Utopai Studios has announced that Hans Ku has joined the company as Chief Product Officer, reporting to CEO and Co-Founder Cecilia Shen. Ku will lead product, engineering, research and business development, and will be responsible for scaling the technology supporting Utopai Studios’ growing film and television slate and expanding PAI, its cinematic storytelling engine for long-form productions, across the company’s productions and industry partnerships.
Ku joins Utopai Studios from The Walt Disney Company, where he served as Vice President of AI & Engineering in the Office of Technology Enablement. His team’s work at Disney expanded from AI-assisted engineering and productivity tools into strategy for generative content and models, and research into AI-native production pipelines. He also played a leadership role in Disney’s landmark collaboration with OpenAI on Sora, connecting OpenAI’s research and product teams with stakeholders across Disney’s business units to help shape how generative video technology could support Disney’s creative and business objectives.
Ku’s career in entertainment technology began at Walt Disney Feature Animation, where he created Creation Station, a paperless drawing and animation system that helped traditional artists move to digital workflows. At DreamWorks Animation, he conceived and launched the DreamColor color-critical display with HP, which received a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“Hans knows what it takes to move emerging technology from experimentation into an organization operating at global scale,” said Cecilia Shen, CEO and Co-Founder of Utopai Studios. “From developing tools for animators early in his career to helping lead Disney’s collaboration with OpenAI on Sora, Hans has consistently worked at the intersection of creative ambition and emerging technology. He brings that experience to a studio where filmmakers and technology teams develop tools together on active productions. That combination is critical to where Utopai Studios is going next. We are building a global studio for a new era of entertainment, and Hans will be central to scaling the technology and infrastructure that make that possible.”
“Utopai Studios has the opportunity to build something fundamentally different because the studio and the technology are growing together,” said Ku. “We can take what we learn from real productions, turn those lessons directly into better products and workflows, and then bring those capabilities to filmmakers and studios around the world. My focus is on building PAI alongside filmmakers, giving them better tools to explore ideas, refine their work, and bring their creative vision to the screen while keeping creative decisions in their hands.”
At Utopai Studios, Ku will set PAI’s direction across AI models, agentic systems, production workflows and collaboration tools, while overseeing the PAI app for filmmakers, PAI Code for developers and agents, enterprise deployments, sales and studio partnerships. He and his teams will also decide where Utopai Studios develops proprietary technology and where it works with outside technology partners.
Ku’s teams will work directly with filmmakers, studios and production companies to develop and refine PAI on active productions and integrate it into studio pipelines. Creative feedback and practical production challenges will inform improvements to models, products and workflows, which filmmakers can then put to work on subsequent productions. He will also oversee PAI’s approach to rights and provenance, including production records that enable studios to trace source material and generated assets.
Ku brings more than two decades of experience across entertainment, technology and content creation. Before returning to Disney, he co-founded Scenely, an AI-native script-to-screen startup, and served as Senior Vice President of Product at Tubi, where his team launched the streaming industry’s first partnership with OpenAI.
At Instagram, Ku led teams responsible for Instagram.com, the Instagram Design System, mobile experiences and emerging interfaces. As Chief Product Officer of Flipagram, he helped evolve the platform into TikTok following its acquisition by ByteDance. He also co-founded mobile video creation company Ptch, which Yahoo acquired. He later led Yahoo Video and the launch of Yahoo Live.
Ku holds a B.S. in chemical engineering and bioengineering from UCLA and an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business. He is a named inventor on multiple patents.
