# Asha Sharma

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/asha_sharma
> Updated: 2026-10-15
> Fact-checked: 2026-10-15
> Categories: AI in Gaming, Microsoft, People
> License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) - attribute to "AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai)"
> Cite as: AI Wiki. "Asha Sharma." aiwiki.ai, 15 Oct 2026. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/asha_sharma
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), the free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Reuse freely with attribution.

Asha Sharma is a technology executive who has been chief executive officer of Xbox, Microsoft's video game business, and an executive vice president of [Microsoft](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/microsoft) since February 2026.[1][2] Before she moved to gaming, she ran product for Microsoft's AI platform, first as corporate vice president and head of product, AI Platform (March 2024 to September 2025) and then as president of CoreAI Product (September 2025 to February 2026).[3] Her earlier jobs were chief operating officer of Instacart, vice president of product at Meta (then Facebook) and chief operating officer of Porch Group.[3][4] As Xbox CEO she started Xbox Labs in October 2026, and since July 2026 she has been one of three external co-leads of the Federal Reserve's Productivity and Jobs task force, which studies the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence.[14][13]

## Career summary

| Period | Organization | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Early career | Microsoft | Marketing and operations[4][5] |
| 2013-2015 | Porch Group | Chief marketing officer[3] |
| 2015-2017 | Porch Group | Chief operating officer[3] |
| 2017-2021 | Facebook (now Meta Platforms) | Product roles including vice president of product[3][5] |
| 2021-2024 | Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) | Chief operating officer[3][5] |
| March 2024 - September 2025 | Microsoft | Corporate vice president and head of product, AI Platform[3][4] |
| September 2025 - February 2026 | Microsoft | President, CoreAI Product[3] |
| February 2026 - present | Microsoft | Executive vice president and CEO, Microsoft Gaming (renamed XBOX on 23 April 2026)[1][8] |

## Early career and Porch

Sharma earned a Bachelor of Science in business from the University of Minnesota and started her career in marketing at Microsoft.[4] Instacart's 2021 announcement says she worked in marketing and operations there before joining Porch, a home services software company.[5][3] At Porch Group she was chief marketing officer from 2013 to 2015 and chief operating officer from 2015 to 2017, according to The Home Depot's director biography.[3] Instacart described her Porch role as covering the company's operations, product, growth and marketing.[5]

## Facebook

From 2017 to 2021 Sharma held several roles at Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms). The Home Depot lists them as including vice president of product for groups that built Messenger, Instagram Direct, Messenger Kids, Remote Presence (calling and video) and company-wide platforms.[3] Instacart's appointment release says she was vice president of product for private communications products across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, and that she had earlier been VP of product for Messenger and head of product for Social Impact.[5]

## Instacart

Instacart announced on 2 February 2021 that it had appointed Sharma as chief operating officer. She was to join in mid-February and report to founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta, and her remit was the Instacart Marketplace: the consumer app, Instacart Logistics, growth and marketing.[5] She held the job until 2024.[3] Coupang and her Xbox biography both credit her with helping lead Instacart through its initial public offering and into profitability.[4][2]

## Microsoft AI platform and CoreAI

Sharma went back to Microsoft in March 2024 as corporate vice president and head of product, AI Platform.[3] In June 2024 Coupang used that title when it named her to its board of directors.[4]

In January 2025 Microsoft formed a new engineering organization, CoreAI - Platform and Tools, led by executive vice president Jay Parikh. Satya Nadella's memo announcing the group said Microsoft would build its AI platform and developer tools, "spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code", on top of [Azure](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/azure).[6] In September 2025 Sharma became president of CoreAI Product, a role in which she "oversaw the teams and technologies that power AI across Microsoft and its enterprise customers", according to The Home Depot.[3] Her official Xbox biography says she led Microsoft's platform through the shift to AI across Azure, [GitHub](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/github) and [Visual Studio Code](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/visual_studio_code), with products that support more than 180 million developers and hundreds of thousands of enterprises building AI applications and agents.[2] CNBC described the CoreAI engineering group as the one that works on [GitHub Copilot](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/github_copilot), Visual Studio Code and other developer tools.[7]

## CEO of Microsoft Gaming and Xbox

### Appointment

On 20 February 2026 Microsoft chairman and CEO [Satya Nadella](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/satya_nadella) told employees that Sharma would become executive vice president and CEO, Microsoft Gaming, reporting to him. She succeeded Phil Spencer, who was retiring after 38 years at Microsoft, 12 of them leading the gaming business. Spencer said he would stay on as an adviser through the summer. In the same announcement Matt Booty was promoted to executive vice president and chief content officer, reporting to Sharma, and Spencer announced that Xbox president Sarah Bond had decided to leave Microsoft.[1][17] Nadella pointed to her "last two years at Microsoft" and her earlier work at Instacart and Meta as experience building and scaling services that "reach billions of people."[1]

Sharma's first memo set out three commitments: "great games", "the return of Xbox" (starting with renewed support for the console) and the "future of play". On AI, she wrote that "we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop", and that games "are and always will be art, crafted by humans."[1]

### Changes in 2026

| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 21 April 2026 | Xbox Game Pass Ultimate fell from US$29.99 to $22.99 a month and PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99, while new Call of Duty games stopped joining Game Pass at launch[9] |
| 23 April 2026 | Microsoft Gaming was renamed XBOX, and Sharma's title became CEO XBOX. The memo named four priority areas: hardware, content, experience and services[8][1] |
| 5 May 2026 | Sharma brought executives from the CoreAI group and from Instacart into Xbox leadership.[7] Sharma said Microsoft would stop developing Gaming Copilot for consoles and begin winding it down on mobile[10] |
| 20 May 2026 | Matthew Ball was appointed chief strategy officer and Scott Van Vliet, previously Microsoft's corporate vice president for Azure OpenAI and AI infrastructure, chief technology officer[11] |
| 6 July 2026 | Sharma announced a restructuring that cuts about 3,200 jobs over the fiscal year, 1,600 of them that day. Compulsion Games and Double Fine were to transition to independent studios, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs agreed terms with new owners, and Arkane began consultation over possible strategic options[12] |
| 13 October 2026 | Sharma announced [Xbox Labs](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/xbox_labs)[14] |

In the 5 May memo, reported by CNBC, Sharma wrote: "We need to evolve how we work and how we are organized across our platform." Four of the new leaders came from CoreAI: Jared Palmer, Tim Allen, Jonathan McKay and Evan Chaki.[7] IGN reported that in her 6 July email to staff she called the restructuring the most significant in Xbox history and said the business "is not healthy."[12]

### Xbox Labs

On 13 October 2026 Sharma published a note to employees on Xbox Wire and on X announcing XBOX LABS, "a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience."[14][16] The note does not give the leader's full name; it says only that Sharma had "asked Scott" to set up the group. Insider Gaming reported that Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet leads it.[14][15]

Sharma pointed to recent projects in which games were "rapidly decompiled and rebuilt" to run on hardware they were not designed for, and Windows PC builds were translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported into web browsers through [WebAssembly](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/webassembly) and WebGPU. She compared games to software development: "Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties." She also wrote that people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, which she put at about five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. The group will "build in the open" and judge success by "whether more people are playing and creating", and Microsoft will share the tools it builds with developers across the industry.[14]

## Federal Reserve task force

On 9 July 2026 the Federal Reserve announced the leadership and objectives of five task forces to advance the conduct of monetary policy, each co-led by external advisers who work with Fed staff and report findings to the Federal Open Market Committee. Sharma is one of three leaders of the Productivity and Jobs task force, alongside Marc Andreessen of [Andreessen Horowitz](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/andreessen_horowitz) and Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, who the Fed said was on leave at [Anthropic](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/anthropic). The task force's stated objective is to "assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments."[13] Her Xbox biography describes her as a co-chair of the task force.[2]

## Board service

Coupang appointed Sharma to its board of directors in June 2024.[4] She has been a director of The Home Depot since 2025 and also sits on the board of The Paley Center for Media.[3][2] Her earlier public company directorships were AppLovin (2021 to 2023) and Porch Group (2015 to 2022).[3]

## References

1. Microsoft Corporate Blogs. "Asha Sharma named EVP and CEO, Microsoft Gaming." The Official Microsoft Blog, 20 February 2026 (editor's note added after 23 April 2026). https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/02/20/asha-sharma-named-evp-and-ceo-microsoft-gaming/
2. Xbox. "Asha Sharma, Chief Executive Officer." Xbox Wire leadership page. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/leadership/asha-sharma/ (accessed 15 October 2026).
3. The Home Depot. "Board of Directors." Investor relations, director biography of Asha Sharma. https://ir.homedepot.com/corporate-governance/board-of-directors (accessed 15 October 2026).
4. Coupang. "Coupang Names Head of Product for the Microsoft AI Group and Former Meta and Instacart Executive Asha Sharma to Board of Directors." Press release, 25 June 2024. https://www.aboutcoupang.com/coupang-names-head-of-product-for-the-microsoft-ai-group-and-former-meta-and-instacart-executive-asha-sharma-to-board-of-directors/
5. Instacart. "Instacart Appoints Operations And Product Leader Asha Sharma As Chief Operating Officer." Press release, 2 February 2021. https://www.instacart.com/company/pressreleases/instacart-appoints-operations-and-product-leader-asha-sharma-as-chief-operating-officer
6. Microsoft Corporate Blogs. "Introducing CoreAI - Platform and Tools" (memo from Satya Nadella to employees). The Official Microsoft Blog, 13 January 2025. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/01/13/introducing-core-ai-platform-and-tools/
7. CNBC. "Microsoft Xbox CEO overhauls leadership amid sinking sales: 'We need to evolve how we work'." 5 May 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/05/microsoft-xbox-ceo-asha-sharma-executive-overhaul.html
8. Matt Booty and Asha Sharma. "We Are XBOX." Xbox Wire, 23 April 2026. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/04/23/we-are-xbox/
9. Tom Warren. "Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gets a price cut but loses new Call of Duty games." The Verge, 21 April 2026. https://www.theverge.com/news/915928/microsoft-xbox-game-pass-ultimate-price-drop
10. Giovanni Colantonio. "Xbox officially kills console's AI chatbot in another big shakeup." Polygon, 5 May 2026. https://www.polygon.com/xbox-ai-gaming-copilot-canceled-asha-sharma-microsoft/
11. Laurent Giret. "Xbox's New CEO Announces More Leadership Changes." Thurrott, 20 May 2026. https://www.thurrott.com/games/336351/xboxs-new-ceo-announces-more-leadership-changes
12. Wesley Yin-Poole. "Microsoft Announces 'Most Significant Restructure in Xbox History'." IGN, 6 July 2026. https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-boss-asha-sharma-announces-3200-layoffs-including-1600-today-with-4-studios-leaving-for-new-management-read-the-email-to-staff-in-full
13. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. "Federal Reserve announces the leadership and objectives of its task forces to advance the conduct of monetary policy." Press release, 9 July 2026. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20260709a.htm
14. Asha Sharma. "Introducing XBOX LABS." Xbox Wire, 13 October 2026. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/10/13/introducing-xbox-labs/
15. Insider Gaming. "Xbox Announces 'Xbox Labs', a New Xbox Division to 'Explore New Technology'." 13 October 2026. https://insider-gaming.com/xbox-labs-announced/
16. Asha Sharma (@asha_shar). Post announcing XBOX LABS. X, 13 October 2026. https://x.com/asha_shar/status/2110083127741702241
17. Ryan McCaffrey. "Phil Spencer Retiring, Sarah Bond Out, Matt Booty Promoted as Microsoft AI Exec Asha Sharma Named New Xbox Boss." IGN, 20 February 2026. https://www.ign.com/articles/phil-spencer-retiring-sarah-bond-out-matt-booty-promoted-as-microsoft-ai-exec-asha-sharma-named-new-xbox-boss-exclusive