Disney employees are enchanted with AI — and a handful of super-users are tapping chatbots tens of thousands of times a month.
In recent months, some Disney tech staffers have gained access to an “AI Adoption Dashboard” that shows AI usage across coding tools Cursor and Claude in tokens used and requests made, two tech employees told Business Insider. Similar dashboards have appeared at major companies like Meta and JPMorgan.
Screenshots of the dashboard viewed by Business Insider show AI usage by about 4,800 product and tech employees across Disney Entertainment and ESPN in a nine-workday span during mid-April. Disney employed approximately 231,000 worldwide as of September 27.
The dashboard is the clearest view yet of Disney’s AI usage as CEO Josh D’Amaro takes over for longtime Mouse House leader Bob Iger.
A person familiar with the company’s strategy said it wasn’t trying to incentivize or reward so-called “tokenmaxxing,” where software engineers burn through tokens to show productivity.
Still, it’s human nature for some employees to see the AI usage dashboard as a “leaderboard,” as one staffer put it. There are “milestones” for AI users to unlock, including streaks based on how many days in a row they use tools, a screenshot viewed by Business Insider shows.
The biggest Claude power user went through 234.2 million tokens after invoking the Anthropic chatbot about 460,600 times over the nine workdays, the dashboard showed. That amounts to more than 51,000 invocations per workday.
Disney’s AI use, by the numbers
Product and tech staffers across Disney and ESPN went through 3.1 billion Claude tokens and 13.3 billion Cursor tokens over the nine workdays, according to a dashboard screenshot.
Disney’s token usage is “in the middle of the bell curve,” which is “in the sweet spot” for a company that isn’t pure-play tech, said Val Bercovici, the chief AI officer at AI memory storage company WEKA, after being briefed on the numbers. He added that the Claude numbers were “very low” compared to the Cursor ones.
One Disney tech employee’s estimated costs were approximately $1 for every 16,700 Claude tokens used and $1 per 21,200 Cursor tokens, based on dashboard data. Bercovici said those were reasonable rates.
If all the dashboard users were charged roughly the same rate as the one tech employee, that means Disney would have estimated costs of about $185,000 and $627,000 for Claude and Cursor, respectively.
That said, it’s tough to know exactly how much Disney employees’ AI usage is costing the company. Tokens are “an imperfect measurement” of real-world costs, said Will Sommer, a quantitative modeling analyst at research firm Gartner who studies AI usage.
Token usage and pricing can vary widely based on factors including the nature of the request and the model used, Sommer added. However, the analysts Business Insider spoke with said Disney tech staffers likely aren’t breaking the bank, based on information from the dashboard.
The cost of 1 million tokens for Claude can range from $0.25 to $15, according to its website.
Power users are putting agent swarms to work
One prolific Cursor user used 287.1 million tokens over about 2,800 requests in the nine-workday span, based on the dashboard screenshot.
“At a tech company, at a Mag 7 company, that’s not a lot at all,” Bercovici said. “But at a Fortune 500, it’s definitely up there.”
There’s a simple explanation for the high numbers: so-called “swarms” of AI agents, which are automated bots that create and delegate tasks to other automated bots.
“The larger numbers can only be agentic,” Bercovici said.
“Those are actually normal numbers for someone that’s invoked a lot of agent swarms,” he added.
Advanced software developers using Claude can go through about 10 million tokens per day, Bercovici said.
Sommer also concluded that Disney’s AI power users are putting agents to work.
“It makes a lot of sense that you would see a couple of users having astronomically high consumption and requests relative to other users,” Sommer said.
Software engineers are evolving alongside AI, going from coding by hand to managing bots that complete tasks for them.
“If you have agents doing the work for you, then you are significantly more productive,” Sommer said. “You can produce more content being a manager of a suite of agents.”
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