Xbox abandons AI Copilot and then hires a bunch of CoreAI staff

Xbox’s CEO has scrapped Microsoft’s AI chatbot companion for consoles, while filling her leadership team with former CoreAI colleagues.

There’s been a flurry of notable Xbox announcements since Asha Sharma became the company’s new CEO, including confirmation of Microsoft’s next console, codenamed Project Helix, and a price drop for Xbox Game Pass.

There have been other changes too, like ditching the much maligned ‘This Is An Xbox’ marketing campaign, as the company tries to bounce back from the failure of the Xbox Series X/S.

Now, Sharma has announced another wave of changes, this time related to Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant and her new leadership team.

In a post on X, Sharma said she wants to ‘address friction’ between players and developers and ‘move faster’ as a company. As part of this, Xbox is scrapping plans to bring Copilot to console, while ‘winding down’ its functionality on mobile.

‘Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers,’ a post on X reads. ‘Today, we promoted leaders who helped build Xbox, while also bringing in new voices to help push us forward. This balance is important as we get the business back on track.

‘As part of this shift, you’ll see us begin to retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed. We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console.

Microsoft has been talking about utilising Copilot in games for years. In 2024, the company released a demo of how the tech could be integrated into Minecraft, where it gave a player advice on how to make a sword and what materials they would require. In other words, it acts as an in-game guide if players are stuck on what to do next.

In March, Microsoft debuted footage of Copilot being used to assist players in Forza Horizon 5, stating it would be released on Xbox Series X/S later this year. However, after this new announcement, that’s presumably no longer happening.

While you could interpret this as a pivot away from AI, Sharma’s newly promoted leaders are cause for concern. According to The Verge, a number of Sharma’s former colleagues within Microsoft’s CoreAI division have been assigned to new roles within Xbox.

This includes Jared Palmer, who is joining Xbox as vice president of engineering and as a technical adviser to Sharma. Additionally, Tim Allen, former Microsoft CoreAI VP of design and GitHub’s senior VP of design and research, is joining Xbox to lead design.

Other former CoreAI employees joining Xbox include Jonathan McKay, who will take charge of growth, data platform, and analytics in his new role, while Evan Chaki – formerly a general manager at CoreAI – will lead a new engineering team within Xbox ‘focused on removing repetitive work, simplifying development, and improving how we operate,’ according to an internal memo.

These changes include some departing Xbox veterans. Roanne Sones, corporate vice president of Xbox devices and ecosystem, is taking a ‘leave of absence after this summer’ but will remain on as an advisor. Meanwhile, Kevin Gammill, corporate vice president of Xbox user experience, is stepping down after nearly 20 years at Microsoft.

The last change is Jason Ronald, vice president of next gen, who has been promoted to an unspecified new role, although it’ll still be strongly connected to Project Helix.

Nepotism may not be the only problem here, as Sharma previously stated she is ‘refocusing’ Xbox’s AI efforts, not abandoning the technology as a whole. There’s also the fact that with Windows apps such as Notepad, Microsoft has made a show of removing Copilot but in reality it just replaced it with a range of other AI tools with less obvious names.

On the surface at least it still seems like positive news, but the big question for Xbox’s use of AI is how it’ll be used in Project Helix – about which we still know nothing.

Still, it’s clear Xbox desperately needs a shake-up, and while we probably won’t feel the effects of these changes for some time, it’s an indication that the status quo is changing signficantly.