Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, confirmed this Tuesday through a post on X that the company is going through a significant internal restructuring, and the first casualty is already clear: Copilot on console is officially cancelled, and the mobile version is being phased out.
Sharma’s message was direct: “Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers.” As part of that shift, the company has promoted veteran Xbox leaders while also bringing in fresh faces with backgrounds in consumer tech and artificial intelligence. The balance, according to Sharma, is key to getting the business back on track.
Sharma posted today on X a short video confirming a brand new boot-up screen is coming to Xbox Series X|S on May 13. The new sequence replaces the classic white-on-black animation with a green logo, no text, no “Xbox” written out on screen, just the sphere, and the startup sound appears to have gotten a subtle tweak as well
New boot up coming next Wednesday. Sound on! pic.twitter.com/9HHrZHwjpH
— Asha (@asha_shar) May 6, 2026
It’s a bold set of moves from someone who has only been in the role since February, when she replaced Phil Spencer following his retirement after 38 years at Microsoft. In just a few months, Sharma has already, brought back the characteristic green of the brand since the original XBox, cut the price of Game Pass, dropped the “Microsoft Gaming” name in favor of simply Xbox, and now she’s overhauling the team from the top down.
Copilot for gaming is dead before it even arrived
Microsoft first announced Copilot for Gaming at the Game Developers Conference in March 2025. The idea was to offer players an AI-powered sidekick capable of providing gameplay tips, coaching, and recaps of where players had left off in a game. A beta launched on the Xbox mobile and PC apps, and later on the ROG Xbox Ally handheld. The console version was supposed to follow later in 2026.
It never got there. Sharma announced the wind-down of Copilot on the Xbox Mobile App and confirmed that development for consoles is cancelled outright. The feature’s entire lifecycle, from announcement to cancellation, lasted roughly 14 months.
The decision didn’t exactly come as a shock. From the moment Copilot for Gaming was revealed, it drew skepticism from the gaming community. GeekWire’s gaming writer Thomas Wilde described it as “a solution looking for a problem,” questioning whether players actually wanted an AI chatbot while they played. He later raised additional concerns about the feature pulling guide content from the open internet without crediting the original sources, arguing it was undermining the very ecosystem it depended on.
Sharma framed the cancellation as part of a broader strategy to retire features that don’t fit the new direction of the company. Her focus, she said, is on refocusing AI efforts toward things that actually solve player problems, like improving real-time graphics, enhancing game discovery, and deepening personalization.
Meet the new Xbox leadership team
As part of the restructuring, four executives are arriving at Xbox directly from Microsoft’s CoreAI group, the same division where Sharma worked before taking over the gaming unit.
The most notable addition is Jonathan McKay, former Head of Growth for ChatGPT at OpenAI, who will now take on the same role at Xbox. Joining him is Jared Palmer, former CoreAI vice president of product and senior vice president at GitHub, who will work on engineering, developer tools, and infrastructure.
Tim Allen, who led design and research at CoreAI and previously at Instacart, takes over as Xbox’s new design lead. And Evan Chaki, a CoreAI general manager, will head up a forward-deployed engineering team focused on simplifying development processes.
Rounding out the new arrivals is David Schloss, former senior director of product and growth at Instacart, who will be responsible for Xbox’s subscription and cloud business.
On the other side of the transition, two long-standing Microsoft veterans are stepping away. Kevin Gammill, corporate vice president overseeing Xbox user experience, game development, and publishing platforms, is leaving the company.
Roanne Sones, corporate vice president for Xbox devices and ecosystem, will take a leave of absence after this summer before moving into an advisory role. Both spent 24 years at Microsoft.
The numbers behind the urgency
The restructuring doesn’t come out of nowhere. Xbox has been facing a sustained decline in revenue that makes the urgency behind Sharma’s moves easier to understand. Gaming revenue for the most recent quarter totaled $5.3 billion, down from $5.7 billion the same period a year earlier.
Hardware revenue fell 33%, hitting a record low for the current console generation. That decline has now shown up in four of the past six quarters, and Microsoft’s latest financial filings also disclosed impairment charges in the gaming business, meaning the company has written down the value of certain gaming assets.
In her internal memo to staff, which was reviewed by CNBC, Sharma was candid about the situation: “Right now, it is too hard to ship impact quickly. We spend too much time inward instead of with the community, and we lack the depth we need in some of the fundamentals.” She also wrote: “We need to evolve how we work and how we are organized across our platform.”
Whether the new team can deliver on those goals is still to be seen. But between killing a feature that never found its audience, cutting prices on Game Pass, bringing in executives with proven growth experience, and now refreshing something as fundamental as the boot-up screen, Sharma is clearly not interested in a slow transition.
Xbox fans have been watching the brand struggle for a while now, and for the first time in a while, it feels like someone inside the building is willing to admit it and act on it.
Are you excited about the direction Asha Sharma is taking Xbox, or are you still in wait-and-see mode? Tell us what you think in the comments!