Xbox boss seemingly champions gen-AI development as she celebrates 25 years of Xbox: “A small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers”

Xbox leader Asha Sharma has alluded to harnessing the power of generative AI when making games, in a memo published this afternoon.

The memo, titled 25 years of Xbox, charts the growth of Microsoft from small beginnings through to the thousands-strong company it is today. But it’s Sharma’s comments at the end of the memo that are of particular interest.

While talking about what the next 25 years could bring, Sharma lamented that “too many ideas never become games” and that “too many games fall short of what their creators imagined”. “For decades, this has been the unavoidable tradeoff of ambition,” she wrote. “We must change this.”

Sharma continued: “Throughout human history, the scale of what we could create was determined by the people, capital, and resources we could command. That relationship is beginning to break. A single person will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations. A small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. And our largest studios will be able to pursue ambitions as far beyond today’s games as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is from its first entry in 1982.”

There is no explicit mention of generative AI here, but the language is suggestive – “a single person will soon be able to wield capabilities that once required entire nations”. Furthermore, Asha’s memo follows last month’s announcement of an Xbox Labs initiative that also sounded like it was based around generative AI, despite avoiding the phrase specifically.

This isn’t a surprise, of course. Microsoft as a wider company is all-in on generative AI, with Copilot, and Sharma’s background at Microsoft is in AI. But it’s an area she’s avoided speaking too enthusiastically about since her hiring as Xbox boss earlier this year. At the time, Sharma said she has “no tolerance for bad AI”, and there’s been such a lot else going on in the months since – including wide-ranging restructuring resulting in the loss of thousands of Xbox jobs – that the topic of generative AI has fallen into the background. Perhaps now we’re seeing the sprouting seeds of it.

We’ve asked Microsoft for clarification.