Xbox CEO Asha Sharma Named Fed Adviser on Jobs and AI

The US Federal Reserve has named Microsoft‘s Xbox chief, Asha Sharma, as one of three co-leaders of a new task force studying how artificial intelligence reshapes work and output. The appointment, announced on July 9, 2026, comes days after she set in motion one of the biggest rounds of layoffs the video-game industry has seen this year.

Sharma will help lead the central bank’s Productivity and Jobs task force, one of five groups Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh assembled to review how the institution conducts monetary policy. The panel is charged with assessing “the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence,” to inform the Fed’s policy decisions. She is the only sitting chief executive named across the five task forces.

Her co-leaders on the panel are Marc Andreessen, cofounder of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Charles I. Jones, a Stanford economist currently on leave at AI developer Anthropic. A separate data task force includes former Walmart chief Doug McMillon, though McMillon has left the top job, leaving Sharma as the only active CEO in the cohort.

Why the Fed tapped a gaming executive

Sharma’s selection reads less as a nod to the games business than to her record in AI. Before taking over Xbox in February 2026, she ran Microsoft’s CoreAI product group, the group responsible for the company’s AI development platform and tools. Earlier she held product roles at Instacart and Meta, where she worked on Facebook Messenger and Instagram’s direct messaging.

That background fits the panel’s brief. Warsh has argued that AI-driven productivity gains could cool inflation and create room to cut interest rates. That makes the technology’s real economic effect one of the more consequential open questions in front of the Fed, given its mandate to pursue both stable prices and maximum employment. The task forces will operate independently and report their findings to the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that sets US interest rates, with recommendations expected by the end of the year.

For Microsoft, the seat hands a senior executive a foothold in Washington’s economic-policy debate at a moment when the company is spending heavily to build out AI infrastructure and services across its business.

An awkward overlap with the Xbox reset

The timing is what makes the appointment notable. Sharma took on the Fed role in the same stretch that she was pushing through a sweeping restructuring of Microsoft’s gaming business. That reset will cut about 3,200 jobs and divest five studios by the end of Microsoft’s 2027 fiscal year, a restructuring that ranks among the industry’s largest of 2026.

Sharma has said Xbox spread itself too thin under previous leadership and that its operating margins run three to 10 times lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. Studios including Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs and Compulsion Games are being cut loose, while state layoff notices have since confirmed hundreds of job losses at ZeniMax Online and roughly 100 at Doom maker id Software. As part of the reset, Microsoft’s largest gaming operations by player numbers — Minecraft maker Mojang and Candy Crush studio King — now report directly to Sharma.

The restructuring follows a wider retrenchment at Xbox that has also seen Game Pass fall short of its subscriber target and funding pulled from outside studio projects. A chief executive advising the Fed on jobs and productivity is, in short, doing so while eliminating thousands of her own, a juxtaposition that has drawn attention to an otherwise technical central-bank announcement.

What the appointment signals

The task forces are part of a broader overhaul Warsh began after taking office as Fed chair in May 2026. He has moved to scale back the detailed forward guidance favored by his predecessor, Jerome Powell, and has framed the review as a test of whether the central bank’s tools still fit a fast-changing economy. Rather than run the review internally, as the Fed has typically done, Warsh has leaned on outside economists, former central bankers and business leaders to lead it.

Xbox is a modest slice of Microsoft’s overall revenue but one of its highest-profile consumer brands, which makes Sharma’s dual role — turnaround executive and federal adviser — a conspicuous one. The role lifts her public profile well beyond gaming just as she remakes a marquee division, and it places the disruption her task force is meant to study, technology reshaping who works and how much they produce, inside the very business she runs.