Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is installing a new group of leaders around her, and most of them, like Sharma, come from an AI background. In a memo to staff announcing the changes, Sharma said the Xbox teams needs to “evolve how we work and how we are organized.”
CNBC, which saw the memo, said Sharma added, “Right now, it is too hard to ship impact quickly. We spend too much time inward instead of with the community, and we lack the depth we need in some of the fundamentals.”
To that end, Sharma announced that the Xbox team is “bringing in new leaders with consumer and technical expertise we do not yet have.”
Four of these people are coming over to Xbox from Microsoft’s CoreAI group, which Sharma was a part of before becoming Xbox CEO in February. Jared Palmer, who was CoreAI’s vice president, is shifting to Xbox to join the technical team where he will work on product and engineering efforts. He will also contribute to matters of “taste,” Sharma said in her memo, though it is not clear what that means.
CoreAI’s vice president of design, Tim Allen, is joining the Xbox team to lead the design efforts, while former head of growth for ChatGPT, Jonathan McKay, is becoming Xbox’s head of growth. He was previously head of growth for CoreAI.
The CoreAI general maneger, Evan Chaki, is taking on the role of leading an engineering team at Xbox that will “look to simplify development and end repetitive work” at Xbox. Former Instacart director of product and growth David Schloss will become the head of Xbox’s subscription and cloud businesses.
Two Xbox staffers are stepping down as part of the change, including Xbox corporate vice president Kevin Gammill, and another Xbox corporate vice president, Roanne Sones, who is taking a leave of absence and will transition to become an Xbox advisor. Both had worked at Microsoft for 24 years.
This is just the latest example of how Sharma is shaking things up as the new Xbox CEO. She personally killed off the “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign and removed Call of Duty from Game Pass. Sharma has also talked about revisiting Microsoft’s stance on exclusives and possibly removing more first-party games from Game Pass.
It’s a big year for Xbox overall, as 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the Xbox brand.
