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

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.

 

[Cruentus]

I don’t look forward to communications, computing power, technologies, and similar things being ‘held hostage’ in space. Particularly not by for-profit companies.

‘AI’ like search browsers and voice menus when you call a business, unfortunately, will eventually just be endemic in our productivity. I do have hope, since my teen son refuses to use or engage with AI, chatGPT, etc.

 

[ART!]

I didn't realize this until now, but for the first two decades or so of my gaming life I never used a computer for anything ttrpg-related. I'm that old!

It also occurs to me that - maybe partly because of the above - there is nothing appealing to me about using AI for anything in my gaming hobby. The whole point of it all, for me, is that it's analogue and manual. I use the character sheets on DDB, but only because that's where the two groups I game with do their thing.

Now, I know I'm sort of "spoiled", in that I've been paid to write, edit, design, and illustrate things. So, if I want an image of my character I can draw it, if I need a map I can make it.

Honestly, it's hard for me to see this issue from the viewpoint of someone who isn't handy at those things, so I'm not judging anyone.

It really is the Gen, more it is the general effort to get us all to pay a subscription for a poorer less capable more opaque search tools, with some added summarisation capability. With a significant chance that the summary has no bearing on the actual thing being summarised.

Yeah, those summaries are designed to seem very useful and handy, so that we will be compelled to use them, but as a result they will spit out lots of words, broken into sections and bullet points, even when they have little to go on.

Did it, though? The work you’d have to do reading the summary, finding the parts it got wrong, and re-writing them probably isn’t significantly less than the time it would have taken you to just write the summary yourself, and for whatever time it may have saved it will be a lower quality product.

Indeed. The work of doing it yourself will make you better at doing it, so that it will be less and less work with increasingly reliable results.

When I was a comic book colorist, there's this initial stage of the process called "flatting", wherein all the areas that might be different colors in the end - even little tiny areas - are given semi-random flat colors that isolate them. (Most coloring in comics is done in Photoshop or the like, and the flatting is done digitally as well.) The flats makes it easy to grab that area later and change it in various ways, to do the creative work of coloring. It's kind of standard practice to hire a "flatter" to do this grunt work. There are even tools that will do it for you with just a click or two (depending on the style of the line art). Once I made enough coloring to warrant hiring a flatter, I did so, or used the flatting tools. But pretty quickly I went back to doing the flatting myself, because I realized that at that stage I was already making artistic choices, and making them then made my work easier later.

So, I imagine some of the grunt work we're having AI do for us is stuff that would actually be better in the long run to do ourselves.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I'm highly intolerant of errors of any sort. I'm also very particular about things. If I had AI summarize a session for example, I'd have to spend time reviewing it carefully to make sure there are no errors. And there almost certainly would be. So if have to correct them. And then I wouldn't like the tone, or voice, or emphasis the AI write things with. So I either have to rewrite those parts or be left with a feeling of disatisfaction. So to get results I am satisfied with would probably take about the same amount of time and energy, but instead of spending that time just being creative, that time would be spent error checking. Not my thing.

Plus, I'm better at avoiding informational errors when I'm putting something together than when I'm looking over something I didn't, because in the former case I know where the information comes from, while in the latter I have to look up where it comes from. Something as simple as the AI summary on search engines is more useful at giving me links to look stuff up than at summarizing it, because there are usually mistakes in the summary.

Now, sometimes those mistakes don't matter because all you need is links to the real sources, or you need a certain type of general info and are adept at knowing what is accurate and isn't because you have relevant skills and knowledge. And that's why I don't just turn off the search assistants entirely. But most people most of the time shouldn't be be using them. To much intentional disinfo in the world to actively court it.

For simple PC art I'll use AI, but it's hard to get results I like. For scene background images to set a mood I'll do the same, though in that case I'm just looking for existing stuff, much of which is AI generated. And those personal game uses are pretty much the limit of what I'll accept for creative purposes (unless you count Dungeon Alchemist battlemaps, but that's kind of a stretch to call AI). I want my creative work done by people.

I think AI has great potential for things like medical diagnosis. It's already way more accurate than doctors. But thing is, you will have the doctor carefully review everything it tells them. Its purpose is to sit through all the stuff the doctor can't remember and tell them what it looks like is going on, so the doctor can go, "wow, yeah, I never would have thought of that, but it does fit the symptoms better than what I was thinking, and it found that complex symptom from the tests I never noticed". I would actively choose to have my doctors do that if I could. I'm also a fan of using it in science for things like materials design. What these sorts of things have in common is that it is doing legwork for experts that will then review it to see what's in going on that they wouldn't have come up with on their own. That's what it is ideal for.

I just see very little in the way of creative or informational summaries from AI that don't sacrifice quality for quantity, and that quality matters way more to me.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don’t look forward to communications, computing power, technologies, and similar things being ‘held hostage’ in space. Particularly not by for-profit companies.

‘AI’ like search browsers and voice menus when you call a business, unfortunately, will eventually just be endemic in our productivity. I do have hope, since my teen son refuses to use or engage with AI, chatGPT, etc.

It's incredibly difficult to shed waste heat in space where you can't dump it into waste water or the atmosphere like air conditioning units do. The iss doesn't have much computing power by datacenter standards either has a huge heatsink just to shed heat the whole "solar power ai datacenters in space" thing only makes sense until you realize that the cooling system for a terrestrial datacenter is house sized just to bleed heat into the atmosphere. Your more likely to see microwave power transmission from orbit to earth

 

[Von Ether]

One of the AI ads during the Super Bowl was pretty much exactly targeting drudge office work. 'AI can finish out that 1000 row spreadsheet in just a few minutes.' 'AI can build that 100 slide power point.' 'AI can create the emails for the layoff notices(*).'
(*)this one wasn't in the ad spot but doesn't take much imagination to picture happening. Have to pay for AI costs somehow.

Waiting for the first product that was play tested solely by AI test bots.

Yep. My personal headcanon for that commercial was, "And now your work for the day is done! You can leave now!" (and pick up your pinkslip on the way out the door.)

Didn't pinkslips originate as a way for a company to give YOU two-weeks notice?

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I don’t look forward to communications, computing power, technologies, and similar things being ‘held hostage’ in space. Particularly not by for-profit companies.

‘AI’ like search browsers and voice menus when you call a business, unfortunately, will eventually just be endemic in our productivity. I do have hope, since my teen son refuses to use or engage with AI, chatGPT, etc.

I was using AI to help me make a picture of a hobgoblin wizard. My kids leaned on me hard and told me it’s bad for the environment, etc.

In this case I just trusted them and told my oldest to draw it for me!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

the whole "solar power ai datacenters in space" thing only makes sense until you realize that the cooling system for a terrestrial datacenter is house sized just to bleed heat into the atmosphere.

Also, anyone who's ever dealt with a server farm knows that you need to replace blades pretty often. This isn't a situation where companies can just fire data centers into space and forget about them.

This whole thing is basically a VC funding pitch, and not a serious idea, unless these companies somehow expect to be sending IT folks up on space walks on a regular basis.

 

[Charlaquin]

I didn't realize this until now, but for the first two decades or so of my gaming life I never used a computer for anything ttrpg-related. I'm that old!

It also occurs to me that - maybe partly because of the above - there is nothing appealing to me about using AI for anything in my gaming hobby. The whole point of it all, for me, is that it's analogue and manual. I use the character sheets on DDB, but only because that's where the two groups I game with do their thing.

I agree, I strongly prefer my D&D be analogue. I’ll use my laptop for notes and stuff, but the physicality and tactility of the game is a major part of its charm. That’s why so many players get way into collecting dice and minis for their characters. They’re physical artifacts that reify the game. Fetishes, if you will (in the anthropological sense, not the kink sense).

Indeed. The work of doing it yourself will make you better at doing it, so that it will be less and less work with increasingly reliable results.

When I was a comic book colorist, there's this initial stage of the process called "flatting", wherein all the areas that might be different colors in the end - even little tiny areas - are given semi-random flat colors that isolate them. (Most coloring in comics is done in Photoshop or the like, and the flatting is done digitally as well.) The flats makes it easy to grab that area later and change it in various ways, to do the creative work of coloring. It's kind of standard practice to hire a "flatter" to do this grunt work. There are even tools that will do it for you with just a click or two (depending on the style of the line art). Once I made enough coloring to warrant hiring a flatter, I did so, or used the flatting tools. But pretty quickly I went back to doing the flatting myself, because I realized that at that stage I was already making artistic choices, and making them then made my work easier later.

So, I imagine some of the grunt work we're having AI do for us is stuff that would actually be better in the long run to do ourselves.

Yep, this is one of the ways in which AI makes us dumber.

 

[Dire Bare]

It was an Air Force test to use AI to go after enemy air defense platforms. The AI started killing anything that it perceived as a threat to that goal. So the operator gave instructions to not kill X,Y, or Z. Then the AI killed the operator. So they added commands to never kill the operator. So the AI started destroying communication towers so it couldn't receive messages that would prevent it from killing.

Well that sounds . . . actually pretty smart. We're doomed.

 

[tetrasodium]

Also, anyone who's ever dealt with a server farm knows that you need to replace blades pretty often. This isn't a situation where companies can just fire data centers into space and forget about them.

This whole thing is basically a VC funding pitch, and not a serious idea, unless these companies somehow expect to sending IT folks up on space walks on a regular basis.

Agreed. Funhy enough though, big parts of starlink kuiper and the like are the result of some research Microsoft did like 20something years ago in collaboration with what was then one of the bigger satellite data providers. They decided that it would cost many times global gdp to launch with the launch costs of the time so they put it out there for people to use if they can figure out a way to make it affordable figuring it an implausible leap