Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has been named one of three external advisors to the Federal Reserve’s new Productivity and Jobs task force, which will assess the economic impact of general-purpose technologies including artificial intelligence on employment and productivity to inform monetary policy. The appointment was announced July 9 by Chairman Kevin Warsh alongside co-advisors Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, currently on leave at Anthropic. Sharma previously led Microsoft’s CoreAI efforts before taking the Xbox role in February 2026.

The timing coincides with Xbox’s largest restructuring to date. On July 6 Sharma announced approximately 3,200 job reductions over FY27, including 1,600 immediate role eliminations and the transfer of four studios—Double Fine, Compulsion, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs—to new management. Additional studio-level cuts at Obsidian, id Software, and ZeniMax have also been reported in connection with the broader reset. The Federal Reserve task force mandate focuses on surveying the pace and reach of new technologies and their implications for the Fed’s employment and inflation objectives.

Sharma’s background in platform scaling at Instacart, Meta, and Microsoft positions her as an industry voice on technology-driven productivity shifts, though the appointment places a corporate executive recently responsible for significant workforce reductions in a role advising on labor market impacts. The other task forces announced cover communications, balance sheet policy, data quality, and inflation frameworks.