Xbox’s newly-appointed head Asha Sharma is sunsetting the company’s Copilot initiative, which was once envisioned as an AI-driven “personal gaming sidekick”, designed to offer real-time advice in games such as Minecraft.
Writing on social media platform X, Sharma admitted Xbox “needs to move faster”, and “deepen [its] connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers”.
Sharma noted the company had recently announced a wave of promotions within Xbox, along with “new voices” to push the company forward. This includes four of Sharma’s former colleagues from Microsoft’s CoreAI division. “This balance is important as we get the business back on track,” Sharma said.
In addition to Xbox’s leadership reshuffle, Sharma also announced another major change within the company: the end of its unpopular AI tool, Copilot. The Xbox head said Copilot will be “winding down” on mobile, while its console development will stop.
Sharma admitted Copilot did not “align” with the direction Xbox is now headed. Sharma also suggested other features that similarly do not align with Xbox’s vision under her leadership could also be retired, though no further details were given at this time.
While Copilot is ending, it is worth cautioning that Sharma’s statement does not mean Xbox is backtracking on its AI plans altogether. Other companies have similarly discontinued less popular initiatives to move its resources elsewhere, a recent example being OpenAI and its text-to-video AI model, Sora, which it ‘said goodbye’ to in April.
This week’s news that Xbox is sunsetting Copilot are just the latest in ongoing changes at the company since Sharma took over from Phil Spencer earlier this year. Sharma has also made changes to Xbox’s Game Pass model, scrapped the “This is an Xbox” campaign, and started pointing attention to the next generation of Xbox hardware, so far known only as Project Helix. This hardware will “lead in performance”, Sharma said, though when exactly we will see it remains something of a mystery.
As Sharma continues work on fixing the Xbox brand image, there is a growing call from the BDS movement to boycott the gaming platform due to parent company Microsoft’s reported complicity in Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian population and state.
