Xbox CEO Asha Sharma appointed to Federal Reserve task force on jobs just days after announcing 3,200 layoffs

The US Federal Reserve has named Xbox CEO Asha Sharma as an adviser to a new task force examining the economic impact of AI on jobs and productivity, an announcement that landed just three days after Sharma oversaw the largest wave of layoffs in gaming history.

The details:

• Sharma has been named to one of several new Federal Reserve task forces made up of private-sector leaders, announced by Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh on July 9. Her group has been asked to "assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments."
• The appointment comes three days after Sharma announced that 3,200 jobs would be cut across Microsoft's gaming division over the next fiscal year, with 1,600 immediate cuts on July 6 alone.
• Sharma is working alongside Charles I. Jones, a Stanford University economist who is also affiliated with AI company Anthropic, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.
• She is the only active CEO among the task force's advisers, which otherwise largely consists of professors and former business and political leaders.
• Before taking the Xbox role, Sharma was president of Microsoft's Core AI division, a background that likely informed her selection for a task force specifically focused on AI's economic impact.
• In her internal memo to Xbox staff this week, Sharma framed the layoffs in terms of organisational simplification: "Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. Our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined."