Asha Sharma revealed something surprising about the decision to cancel CoPilot for Xbox.
When Asha first announced this decision last May, it completely took everyone unaware. Asha famously came from Microsoft’s AI division, and the public expected her to integrate AI to gaming even more.
In a new interview with Bloomberg, Asha gave a simple explanation:
..our console players aren’t excited about that experience in their console.
But then, she said this:
And so I made that call. So Satya was cool with that.
It was an Xbox decision. He’s given me latitude to make the best decisions for our players.
Knowing how much Microsoft invested in AI, and that Satya Nadella himself is personally invested, it took a lot of clout to reject this AI implementation.
Microsoft will have to find other ways to push their $ 135 billion + investment in AI over this. Of course, they are aggressively looking for new ways to do that.
It’s surprising that Asha almost tells this story in passing, because it’s hard to imagine other tech CEOs could cancel AI projects this easily.
We seem to have our assurance that Xbox has true independence to make their choices now.
