Cut 3,200 Xbox Jobs, Land a Federal Reserve Gig

"These changes are about a bigger future for Xbox, not a smaller one." That was Asha Sharma's message to the thousands of Xbox employees who learned this week that their jobs were being eliminated. By the time those words landed, Sharma had already been named to a US government advisory role focused on, of all things, employment.

The Federal Reserve announced on July 9 that it had established five new task forces to advise on monetary policy. Sharma was named as one of three external advisers co-leading the Productivity and Jobs group, which will "assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments." Her co-leaders are Marc Andreessen, the Andreessen Horowitz co-founder who is deeply invested in multiple AI companies and once wrote a blog post declaring AI would save the world, and Stanford economics professor Charles I. Jones, who is currently on leave because Anthropic recently hired him to study AI's economic impact.

So the Federal Reserve's panel on jobs and AI is being co-led by a venture capitalist with billions riding on AI's success, an economist on loan from an AI company, and the executive who just oversaw gaming's biggest mass layoff of 2026. I'm not sure what rigorous, unbiased policy advice this group is expected to produce, but the composition speaks for itself.

3,200 Cuts and Counting

Sharma succeeded Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO earlier this year after serving as president of Microsoft's CoreAI division. Before Microsoft, she held executive roles at Meta, Instacart, and Porch. Since taking over Xbox, she has rebranded Microsoft Gaming as Xbox, reduced Game Pass pricing, discontinued Gaming Copilot, and restructured studio leadership. The layoffs are the most visible consequence of what she has called a "reset" of the Xbox business.

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh framed the task forces in sweeping terms in the press release:

"The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers' means and methods, analytical tools, and policy approaches can be improved upon. I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution."

The task forces will operate independently, and the Fed says progress updates will be posted periodically on its website. Sharma is the only active CEO named across all five groups.

The Company She Keeps

Andreessen's inclusion is its own story. This is a man who published a "techno-optimist manifesto" in 2023 calling AI "our society's philosopher's stone" and who has some questionable opinions about how large language models should be deployed. His firm has poured money into AI startups across the board. Asking him to objectively assess AI's impact on employment is like asking an oil executive to evaluate the environmental risks of drilling.

I keep coming back to the specific mandate of this task force: assessing how new technologies, including AI, affect jobs. Sharma's most recent professional act was eliminating 3,200 of them. Her background before Xbox was running Microsoft's AI division. She is not being asked to advise on something she has studied from a distance. She is being asked to advise on something she has actively done, to workers who are still processing their severance paperwork.

Microsoft's chief communications officer Frank X. Shaw responded this week to a separate controversy around the layoffs, pushing back against conspiracy theories linking the cuts to H-1B visa abuse. Shaw stated that the layoffs "were made to restructure the Xbox business because it is not healthy" and were "not made to replace employees with foreign workers." He added that Xbox remains "the largest employer of American workers in the gaming industry."

None of that changes what this appointment looks like from the outside. You don't have to buy into any conspiracy theory to find it jarring that someone who just put 3,200 people out of work is now advising the US government on employment policy. The Federal Reserve says it wants "candid feedback" and "rigorous findings." Sharma certainly has firsthand data on what happens when a technology-focused executive restructures a workforce. Whether that makes her the right person to protect those workers' interests going forward is a question the Fed apparently didn't feel the need to ask.