All of your fears and worries about the future of Xbox should be put at ease. Asha Sharma, the newly appointed CEO of Microsoft Gaming, promises that she has "no tolerance for bad AI."
Sharma took over as the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming today following the double retirement of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond from Microsoft. Sharma was previously in charge of Microsoft's CoreAI platform. CoreAI being both a platform and set of tools that is pushing a bunch of artificial intelligence (AI) use into basically everything at Microsoft, from internal development tools to the user-facing Copilot AI.
Prior to her 2024 appointment as the president of CoreAI, she previously held executive roles at Instacart and Meta.
After it was announced that Sharma, Microsoft's main AI czar behind Satya Nadella, was now in charge of Xbox, fears began to spread quickly that the future of Xbox would be absolutely stuffed with AI. Just, AI everywhere in the Xbox platform. So much AI slop. Everywhere.
Well, worry not Xbox fanatics, because Sharma is here to tell you directly that she does not plan to include any "bad AI" into the Xbox platform. From here on out, it's only going to be top-quality AI, a thing that does not actually exist in any form.
In an interview with Variety, Sharma states that she has "no tolerance for bad AI."
'AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be,' Sharma said, noting that gaming needs new 'growth engines,' but that 'great stories are created by humans'.
