The last talk I attended at GDC 2026 before flying home that night was a Microsoft presentation on Gaming Copilot. It laid out ways that the company was trying to use AI and LLM models to improve playing on Xbox. I wrote at the time that the goal of the presentation was to “make gaming AI on Xbox sound less scary to an audience skeptical of its potential.” But when I shared a clip online of what it sounds like when you ask Copilot for help in a game like Sea of Thieves, many gamers, including Xbox fans, were immediately repulsed. Less than two months later, Microsoft is killing the initiative.
“Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers,” recently appointed Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote on X on May 5. “Today, we promoted leaders who helped build Xbox, while also bringing in new voices to help push us forward. This balance is important as we get the business back on track. As part of this shift, you’ll see us begin to retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed. We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console.”
Microsoft is bringing Gaming Copilot to Xbox later this year.
Here’s what it sounds like when you ask the AI for help:https://t.co/11rzlunD2J pic.twitter.com/HSS6LJC0VO
— Kotaku (@Kotaku) March 14, 2026
It’s the latest popular move by an executive who’s moving fast to, in the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, “win back fans.” It’s also an unexpected one coming from a non-Xbox native who joined from Microsoft’s CoreAI division. Copilot always seemed like an awkward fit for Xbox, especially after average consumers had already rejected it on PC. It’s not clear where that leaves the company’s big bets on AI to reshape the economy, but it’s the most notable boondoggle yet that Sharma’s thrown in the bin.
Xbox isn’t abandoning AI entirely. AutoSR, a feature to have hardware automatically optimize performance to achieve better trade-offs between resolution and framerate, just recently rolled out on the ROG Xbox Ally X for users in the Xbox Insider testing program. It’s unclear if that will still come to console later this year as previously planned. But AutoSR is a much more obvious fit for the platform as Microsoft tries to figure out what belongs, and what doesn’t, moving forward.
