The Walt Disney Company is certainly no stranger to using artificial intelligence (AI), especially after it was announced that the House of Mouse had partnered with OpenAI — though that partnership eventually ended up falling through.

Computer Lady on Spaceship Earth

Now, according to Business Insider, it’s Anthropic’s Claude AI and Cursor AI — a coding platform — that Disney employees are using, oftentimes billions of times in just over one week. In fact, the company has an “AI Adoption Dashboard” that shows who is using the most AI tokens (units of data processed by Large Language Models or LLMs), or “tokenmaxxing.”

According to the report, The Walt Disney Company has given some tech employees access to an “AI Adoption Dashboard” that tracks token usage across AI coding tools Cursor and Claude, which shows staffers the number of employees actively using AI, the number of requests made, and the number of tokens used over a given period.

©Disney | Walt Disney Company Headquarters

Not only that, but the dashboard also displays the most active AI users by requests made and tokens used. One employee referred to it as a “leaderboard.” The same staffer also said that employees are being encouraged by managers to use AI tools more often.

“They’re celebrating it now, but we’ll see how long that lasts,” they said.

Hey Mickey!

The biggest users of AI at Disney make hundreds of requests per day on average and use tens of millions of tokens, according to the dashboard.

One Disney employee “invoked Claude about 460,000 times over nine work days in mid-April,” based on what the dashboard said — that’s about 51,000 times per day. The high usage is likely from autonomous agents — or software that can make decisions and interact with external systems to complete tasks with minimal human oversight.

Another Cursor user used 287.1 million tokens over about 2,800 requests in those same nine days, the dashboard showed.

Walt Disney Company Headquarters ©LA Times

Disney’s AI adoption dashboard has reportedly been around for months, according to employees, so it was in place before Josh D’Amaro officially took over as the new Disney CEO. Now that Disney’s deal with OpenAI is no longer happening, D’Amaro will have to decide what the company’s AI strategy will look like, as it’s previously been marked as a “top priority.”

Josh D’Amaro at Destination D23, 2023 ©Disney

Business Insider viewed screenshots of the AI dashboard that showed usage by around 4,800 product and tech employees across Disney Entertainment and ESPN in a nine-workday span during mid-April.

There are “milestones” for AI users to unlock, including streaks based on how many days in a row they use the platforms.

ESPN Wide World of Sports

Overall, product and tech employees at Disney and ESPN used 3.1 billion Claude tokens and 13.3 billion Cursor tokens over those same nine workdays, according to the screenshot of the dashboard.

One employee’s estimated costs for using AI were around $1 for every 16,700 Claude tokens used and $1 per 21,000 Cursor tokens used, per dashboard data. Val Bercovici, chief AI officer at AI memory storage company WEKA, said these rates were “reasonable.” If every dashboard user were charged the same as this one employee, Disney would have estimated costs of $185,000 and $627,000 for using Claude and Cursor, respectively.

Walt Disney Company Headquarters in Burbank

Essentially, the high numbers are due to “swarms” of AI agents, or automated bots that create and delegate tasks to other automated bots. Bercovici said that advanced software developers using Claude can go through about 10 million tokens per day.

According to Will Sommer, a quantitative modeling analyst who studies AI usage at the research firm Gartner, “If you have agents doing the work for you, then you are significantly more productive. You can produce more content being a manager of a suite of agents.”

Hey Minnie!

Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see how this significant AI usage impacts The Walt Disney Company — if at all. We’ll be on the lookout for even more Disney and AI updates you need to know about. In the meantime, make sure you stay tuned to the Disney Food Blog for the latest Disney news and more.

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