Asha Sharma, the Xbox CEO who told her own staff the business was not healthy

Asha Sharma

Photo: Jasonglewis / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1989 Racine
Occupation	Businessperson

Asha Sharma arrived at Xbox with a résumé that made gamers nervous and investors curious. She had run operations at a grocery-delivery company, built messaging products at Facebook and built artificial intelligence tools for developers at Microsoft. She had never worked at a game studio. Within months of taking over one of the three console platforms that matter, she had lowered the price of its subscription, killed its AI chatbot, spun off studios and written to thousands of employees that the business they worked for was not healthy. Her wager is simple to state and hard to prove: that the fastest way to rescue Xbox is to admit, in public, how badly it was doing.

Nothing about her background pointed at games. Sharma grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, in a family of Indian descent; her parents had come to the United States from New Zealand and later divorced, and her mother worked at a department store. As a teenager she worked on a golf course and pictured herself as a doctor, ideally the team physician for the Green Bay Packers. She took her first corporate job at S.C. Johnson at seventeen. At the University of Minnesota she studied business instead of medicine, joined research projects in Hungary and Poland, and helped start a nonprofit that raised around half a million dollars.

She graduated from the university’s Carlson School of Management in 2011 and, at twenty-two (she was born in 1989), took her first job out of college in Microsoft’s marketing department. Two years later she left for Porch, a Seattle home-services startup, where she became chief marketing officer and then chief operating officer. The pattern that would define her career showed up early: she moved toward the part of a company where growth was measured daily, and she stayed long enough to own the numbers.

In 2017 she joined Facebook as vice president of product for Messenger and the private communications tools that ran across Facebook and Instagram, products used by billions of people. In 2021 Instacart hired her as chief operating officer, the executive responsible for the logistics that decide whether groceries arrive on time. She held the role through the company’s public listing in September 2023 and left in March 2024 to return to Microsoft, this time as head of product for its AI platform. In September 2025 she was promoted to president of the CoreAI product organization, overseeing tools used by more than 180 million developers. On paper she was one of Satya Nadella’s AI builders.

Then, on February 20, 2026, Microsoft announced that Phil Spencer was retiring and that Sharma would become executive vice president and chief executive of Microsoft Gaming. The choice surprised the industry. It passed over Sarah Bond, Spencer’s second in command, who left the company, and it put an AI product executive in charge of a division whose fans were already suspicious of AI. Sharma’s first message tried to meet that suspicion head on. Games, she wrote, are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and Xbox would not chase short-term efficiency or flood its ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Matt Booty was promoted to chief content officer beside her. In April the division dropped the Microsoft Gaming name and became Xbox again.

Her early moves read like a list of things players had been asking for. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate got cheaper, although the discount came with the loss of day-one access to new Call of Duty releases. Copilot on Xbox consoles was wound down. The “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign, which had framed almost any screen as an Xbox, was retired. When online critics claimed her social media account was written by a bot, she answered with her gamertag, AMRAHSAHSA, and explained that she had started playing to understand the world she now ran.

The critical reading of her first year starts with the promise about efficiency. In July 2026 Sharma announced what she called the most significant restructure in Xbox history: around 3,200 job cuts during the fiscal year, 1,600 of them immediate. Compulsion Games and Double Fine were set to become independent, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs to move to new owners, and Arkane entered consultation over a possible sale. In her email to staff she said Xbox was running at margins three to ten times lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. The candor was unusual for a Microsoft executive, and it sat awkwardly next to a February pledge that many employees had read as protection. Critics have pointed at the optics too. In September, as further cuts reached studios including World’s Edge, its former head Shannon Loftis mocked a well-publicised visit by Sharma to Kojima Productions in Tokyo as a “Kojima-maxxing trip”. To her supporters the restructure is surgery on a business that shed $1.7 billion in revenue in a year when 200 million new players arrived; to her detractors it is the efficiency drive she said she would avoid, led by someone who has never had to make one.

The plan she has put forward is built around four priorities: strengthening the console-led platform, growing hit games into global franchises, turning Minecraft into a creator platform, and extending the worlds fans already love into other media. The target is a return to growth by the end of 2027 and industry-leading margins by the end of the decade. Some of it is already visible. In September Xbox Game Studios took over publishing of Hideo Kojima’s espionage game PHYSINT after Sony dropped it, with a partnership that also reaches into film and television. A Wall Street Journal profile described an executive who spends hours every month answering player support tickets herself, and who repeats that clarity is kindness.

Outside Xbox, Sharma sits on the boards of The Home Depot, Coupang and the Paley Center for Media, and co-chairs a Federal Reserve task force on productivity, jobs and artificial intelligence. She is married, has three children in a blended family in which she first became a stepmother, holds a second-degree black belt in taekwondo and has named Indra Nooyi as a model.

The next test arrives this week. On September 29 she posted a clip of herself unlocking the Mythic achievement in Gears of War: E-Day, which demands every one of its 55 achievements. The game opens to early-access players on October 1 and launches worldwide on October 6. Whether it sells will say more about her reset than any memo.

Tags: business, Xbox, microsoft, ceos, business leaders, Satya Nadella, Asha Sharma