Whenever Phil Spencer eventually decided to retire from his position as Xbox boss and Microsoft Gaming CEO, we naturally assumed that position would go to Xbox president Sarah Bond — but with Sarah leaving the company following Phil Spencer's retirement last night, it's ended up going to the relatively unknown Asha Sharma instead.
So, who is Asha Sharma? Let's take a quick look back at the career of the new Xbox boss until now.
We'll start off with what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had to say about Sharma in his statement yesterday:
"Over the last two years at Microsoft, and previously as Chief Operating Officer at Instacart and a Vice President at Meta, Asha has helped build and scale services that reach billions of people and support thriving consumer and developer ecosystems. She brings deep experience building and growing platforms, aligning business models to long-term value, and operating at global scale, which will be critical in leading our gaming business into its next era of growth."
Indeed, Asha Sharma has been at Microsoft for the past two years as the President of the CoreAI Product, in which her role was to "oversee the teams and technologies that power AI across Microsoft and its enterprise customers".
Here's how Microsoft specifically defined the position ahead of a Microsoft Ignite Keynote last year:
"In this role, she oversees the teams and technologies that power AI across Microsoft and its enterprise customers—spanning critical infrastructure, foundation models, and end-to-end toolchains for building, managing, and deploying AI and agentic applications. Her portfolio includes Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Machine Learning, Responsible AI, AI Search, customizable APIs and Azure AI Services. She also leads Applied Engineering, Computational Engineering and Growth for Microsoft’s Core AI division."
And here's a look at Sharma's presentation in that actual event:
Prior to working at Microsoft, the new Xbox boss was indeed the COO at grocery delivery and pickup service Instacart from 2021 to 2024, working on "product, design, data science, research, marketing, operations, customer support [and] new businesses". Prior to that, she was at Meta for four years from 2017 to 2021 in various leadership roles, including Head of Product across Messenger and Instagram Direct.
Go back even further, and Sharma helped launch the insurance company Porch Group while also leading various aspects of the business including engineering, sales and operations from 2013 to 2017. She even had a previous stint at Microsoft in marketing from 2011 to 2013 as well.
Sharma has won various awards, she's a board member for multiple companies, and she's ultimately proven herself to be a trusted leader on repeated occasions. We're willing her to succeed at Xbox in what's turning out to be controversial times for the brand, and we wish her the best of luck in her new role!
We'll leave you with another more informal interview with Sharma from back at Microsoft Ignite 2024: