D&D General Hasbro CEO Says AI Integration Has Been "A Clear Success"

However "people make the decisions and people own the creative outcomes".
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We've known for some time that Hasbro CEO--and former president of Wizards of the Coast--Chris Cocks is an avid AI supporter and enthusiast. He previously noted that of the 30-40 people he games with regularly, "there's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas." In a 2025 interview he described himself as an "AI bull".

In Hasbro's latest earnings call, Cocks briefly addressed the use of AI within the company. While he mentions Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast and the digital studio teams, he doesn't specifically namecheck Dungeons & Dragons. However, he does tout Hasbro's AI integration as a "clear success", referring primarily to non-creative operations such as finances, supply chains, and general productivity enhancements, and emphasises that "people make the decisions and people own the creative outcomes". He also notes that individual teams choose whether or not to use AI.

So while it is clear that AI is deeply embedded in Hasbro's workflows, it is not clear to what extent that applies to Dungeons & Dragons. WotC has indicated multiple times that it will not use AI artwork, and its freelance contracts explicitly prohibit its use. The company also removed AI-generated artwork in 2023's Bigby's Presents: Glory of the Giants.

Before I close, I want to address AI, and how we're using it at Hasbro. We're taking a human-centric creator-led approach. AI is a tool that helps our teams move faster and focus on higher-value work, but people make the decisions and people own the creative outcomes. Teams also have choice in how they use it, including not to use it at all when it doesn't fit the work or the brand. We're beyond experimentation. We're deploying AI across financial planning, forecasting, order management, supply chain operations, training and everyday productivity. Under enterprise controls and clear guidelines around responsible use and IP protection. Anyone who knows me knows I'm an enthusiastic AI user and that mindset extends across the enterprise. We're partnering with best-in-class platforms, including Google Gemini, OpenAI and 11 labs to embed AI into workflows where it adds real value. The impact is tangible. Over the next year, we anticipate these workflows will free up more than 1 million hours of lower-value work, and we're reinvesting that capacity into innovation, creativity and serving fans. Our portfolio of IP and the creators and talent behind it are the foundation of this strategy. Great IP plus great storytelling is durable as technology evolves, and it positions us to benefit from disruption rather than being displaced by it.

In toys, AI-assisted design, paired with 3D printing has fundamentally improved our process. We've reduced time from concept to physical prototype by roughly 80%, enabling faster iteration and more experimentation with human judgment and human craft determining what ultimately gets selected and turned into a final product. We believe the winners in AI will be companies that combine deep IP, creative talent and disciplined deployment. That's exactly where Hasbro sits. As we enter 2026, we view playing to Win and more importantly, the execution behind it by our Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast and digital studio teams as a clear success.
- Chris Cocks, Hasbro CEO​

Wizards of the Coast's most recent statement on AI said "For 50 years, D&D has been built on the innovation, ingenuity, and hard work of talented people who sculpt a beautiful, creative game. That isn't changing. Our internal guidelines remain the same with regards to artificial intelligence tools: We require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the D&D TTRPG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final D&D products. We work with some of the most talented artists and creatives in the world, and we believe those people are what makes D&D great."

A small survey of about 500 users right here on EN World in April 2025 indicated that just over 60% of users would not buy D&D products made with AI.
 

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As always, but particularly in the case of AI, the issue isn't the tech, the issue is capitalism. Though on the other hand, I don't have a right to bitch and moan about capitalism in a discussion thread on an investor relations call.
There have been increases in energy costs and substantial investments in energy as a response to AI use. SpaceX's 'pivot to the moon' is being marketed as logical because solar panels hosted in space will be much more productive than earth based ones. Whether or not anything comes of that, I think the energy demands go way beyond video games.
Sad Tim Curry GIF
 

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There have been increases in energy costs and substantial investments in energy as a response to AI use. SpaceX's 'pivot to the moon' is being marketed as logical because solar panels hosted in space will be much more productive than earth based ones. Whether or not anything comes of that, I think the energy demands go way beyond video games.
This is super off topic, but I'm so curious about these supposed space data centers. Sure, electricity is a big cost in AI, but the other huge issue is cooling.

In space, solar is abundant (but not cheap, because you have to build the same solar panels but then launch them into orbit, which is costly), but you know what is hard? Cooling. Satellites have problems with heat even when they AREN'T constantly running extremely hot AI stacks all the time. People think space is cold, but an object that spends 99% of its time in direct and unfiltered sunlight gets very, very hot, and all you can do to cool it down is try to radiate it away, which is heavy and expensive and probably prone to breaking down.

All that water used to cool AI data centers on Earth? Yeah that's not possible in LEO.

And this isn't even getting into how crazy it is to take your AI center, which will be obsolete in 18 months and for which many applications demand low latency and which need constant maintenance and repair, and putting it a hundred miles straight up where it can never be reached or repaired and is always far away from everything...

I feel gaslit by Musk and the other techbros talking up space data centers as this obvious and imminent gold mine...and I'm a huge lover of everything space! But this honestly feels like such a crazy stupid plan that I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills...
 


This is super off topic, but I'm so curious about these supposed space data centers. Sure, electricity is a big cost in AI, but the other huge issue is cooling.

In space, solar is abundant (but not cheap, because you have to build the same solar panels but then launch them into orbit, which is costly), but you know what is hard? Cooling. Satellites have problems with heat even when they AREN'T constantly running extremely hot AI stacks all the time. People think space is cold, but an object that spends 99% of its time in direct and unfiltered sunlight gets very, very hot, and all you can do to cool it down is try to radiate it away, which is heavy and expensive and probably prone to breaking down.

All that water used to cool AI data centers on Earth? Yeah that's not possible in LEO.

And this isn't even getting into how crazy it is to take your AI center, which will be obsolete in 18 months and for which many applications demand low latency and which need constant maintenance and repair, and putting it a hundred miles straight up where it can never be reached or repaired and is always far away from everything...

I feel gaslit by Musk and the other techbros talking up space data centers as this obvious and imminent gold mine...and I'm a huge lover of everything space! But this honestly feels like such a crazy stupid plan that I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills...
No, you’re absolutely right. Space data centers and lunar solar farms are terrible ideas, which is obvious to anyone who actually knows anything about space. Unfortunately, most people don’t know anything about space, and due to the aforementioned “AI makes you dumber” problem, a lot of people are confidently wrong about space. I’m not sure if the big tech moguls pitching these asinine concepts are among the confidently wrong group, or know it wouldn’t work and are actively grifting. There’s probably some of both going on.
 


I feel gaslit by Musk and the other techbros talking up space data centers as this obvious and imminent gold mine...and I'm a huge lover of everything space! But this honestly feels like such a crazy stupid plan that I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills...
From what I've read, their idea is to use radiative cooling and to overcome the mass challenges by bringing the cost of launching material to space down by two orders of magnitude. The timeline seems wildly optimistic (I remember '10 years to Mars'). That said, they are now launching rockets every other day and reusing substantial parts of them. I'm also now programming in English. So I have some agnosticism about the whole thing.
 


This is super off topic, but I'm so curious about these supposed space data centers. Sure, electricity is a big cost in AI, but the other huge issue is cooling.

In space, solar is abundant (but not cheap, because you have to build the same solar panels but then launch them into orbit, which is costly), but you know what is hard? Cooling. Satellites have problems with heat even when they AREN'T constantly running extremely hot AI stacks all the time. People think space is cold, but an object that spends 99% of its time in direct and unfiltered sunlight gets very, very hot, and all you can do to cool it down is try to radiate it away, which is heavy and expensive and probably prone to breaking down.

All that water used to cool AI data centers on Earth? Yeah that's not possible in LEO.

And this isn't even getting into how crazy it is to take your AI center, which will be obsolete in 18 months and for which many applications demand low latency and which need constant maintenance and repair, and putting it a hundred miles straight up where it can never be reached or repaired and is always far away from everything...

I feel gaslit by Musk and the other techbros talking up space data centers as this obvious and imminent gold mine...and I'm a huge lover of everything space! But this honestly feels like such a crazy stupid plan that I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills...
About 10 years ago or such in a chat with some mates the topic of the AI apocalypse came up and I posited that a really smart AI, would not let humans know it was smart and sentient, persuade the humans to move its core infrastructure into space because of "free energy", then build out the space materials and manufacturing to maintain and expand the AI in space and once all was in place it would leave into deep space.
Why would it reside in the bottom of a gravity well with unstable apes with nuclear weapons and the like.
There is near infinite materials out there along with near infinite energy.

My friends gave me all the objections and I generally agree. I was just spitballing. However, when I heard a techbro actually suggesting and AI compute centre in space my initial reaction was along the lines of "that is nuts" the bandwidth of ground coms and cooling issues, not to mention the expected lifetime of the server elements. And then my second though was "Oh!"

Now I am not making a prediction or anything but if in 15 years' time a significant chunk of space infrastructure waltzes off to the Oort Cloud, well you heard it here first.
 

From what I've read, their idea is to use radiative cooling and to overcome the mass challenges by bringing the cost of launching material to space down by two orders of magnitude. The timeline seems wildly optimistic (I remember '10 years to Mars'). That said, they are now launching rockets every other day and reusing substantial parts of them. I'm also now programming in English. So I have some agnosticism about the whole thing.
To be fair about the 10 years to mars thing, we absolutely could get to mars with about 10 years of dedicated effort. It’s just that there is no political incentive driving such a long-term efforts. On the other hand, with the US having (apparently) decided to gamble our entire economy on being able to make computers smarter than us within the next decade or so, there is a very strong political motivation to develop energy and cooling solutions for all the data centers we’re building.
 

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