Xbox’s Asha Sharma now helps shape US Fed Policy, somehow

Imagine getting a seat advising the Federal Reserve on artificial intelligence and jobs in the same week your own company axed a chunk of its workforce. That’s Asha Sharma’s July.

Asha Sharma lands a seat on the Fed’s AI task force

The Fed announced a batch of new task forces aimed at figuring out how the central bank should actually conduct monetary policy going forward, and Sharma landed a spot on the Productivity and Jobs group. She’s in there alongside Marc Andreessen and Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, who happens to be on leave from Anthropic at the moment. Small world, considering the whole task force exists to work out what AI is doing to the economy.

The Fed’s own framing is that these groups exist to weigh whether new general-purpose tech, AI chief among it, should change how policymakers think and act. Chairman Kevin Warsh leaned hard into the “consequential moment” language, which, fair enough, it probably is.

Xbox cancelled Sawyer’s original RPG to give him Fallout

The timing nobody can ignore

What makes the timing genuinely wild is that Asha Sharma is barely a few days removed from confirming a sweeping Xbox reset. Studios that Microsoft had folded into its gaming division are being spun back out as independent, others handed off to new owners entirely, and a fair few people lost their jobs in the process. That’s the same executive now set to help advise on national employment policy.

From Xbox’s AI sceptic to Fed Advisor

Asha Sharma took the top job after Phil Spencer stepped away and Sarah Bond’s subsequent exit left the seat open, and she’s come in with an AI background from her time at Microsoft. For what it’s worth, she’s previously said she has no time for “bad AI” showing up in games, so it’s not like she’s an uncritical booster. Whether that scepticism translates into anything useful on a Fed task force is another matter entirely.

Project Helix, Xbox’s next console with PC-hybrid ambitions, is still the thing she’s meant to be steering toward launch. Now she’s doing that with a Fed appointment on the side. Multitasking, corporate-America style.

---

For more updates like this, check out the gaming news section!