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When Asha Sharma was made the head of Xbox back in early 2026, one of her early moves was to bring over a bunch of employees from the CoreAI division at Microsoft, including its VP of Product in the form of Jared Palmer.
Imagine everyone's surprise, then, when Palmer announced on social media yesterday that he was leaving Xbox and taking up a new role as Vice President of Engineering at AI company Cognition!
Here's a look at the announcement:
This immediately drew a lot of questions and speculation on social media about why the new "VP, Engineering" at Xbox would leave so suddenly, but well-known Windows Central reporter Jez Corden argues that it's actually a "non-story" and they left because they were offered a "multi-million dollar offer" to switch companies.
GamesBeat editor Dean Takahashi then argued that gaming could face this situation "over and over" in the future:
Of course, there's only so much we know about what happened here, but we wish Jared all the best in his new role at Cognition, and ultimately this does sound like much ado about nothing based on Corden's assessment of the situation.
Xbox may have an important position to fill going forward though. Asha Sharma originally described Jared Palmer's role as working "directly with me on our most complex product and engineering problems, with a focus on developer tooling, taste, and infrastructure", and we're assuming she won't want to just remove that role entirely.
Will she look to CoreAI for an employee that could solve those problems once again, or hire from outside of Microsoft this time? In any case, we'll keep an eye on the situation and let you know if anything notable comes of it.