Microsoft’s gaming business is in a bit of a state right now . Yesterday, Xbox/Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer, a Microsoft veteran of nearly 40 years and an original Xbox team member, resigned… as did his second-in-command, the architect of the “ This is an Xbox ” marketing push. The incoming executive is Asha Sharma, formerly the head of product development for CoreAI. Uh oh. Spencer was something of a darling for both gamers and the media, but there’s no denying that Xbox has been struggling. The current generation Series X/S is being outsold by the PS5 two-to-one after similar performance over the last decade-plus, and Microsoft seems more interested in getting its huge, expensive collection of properties on other hardware. Things got so bad last year, after the unpopular consoles got an unprecedented mid-cycle price increase , that it was rumored major retailers were dropping Xbox completely. That turned out to be overblown… but suffice it to say, there’s not a lot of reason to buy an Xbox if you have basically any other gaming device right now. So, as a more conventional business leader coming into the gaming space, Sharma will have an uphill battle to revive a floundering brand. It certainly doesn’t help that gamers, already wary of “AI” infecting more and more of their hobby, will be extra critical of someone whose last job was all about LLM. But according to an interview with Variety , Sharma considers herself a “platform builder,” which is certainly something Xbox and Microsoft gaming could use at the moment. In an apparent rebuke of the reportedly unpopular “This is an Xbox” campaign, she remarked that she would oversee a “return to Xbox.” But what about the elephant in the room, the one that’s suspiciously smooth with two trunks and five legs? On the topic of “AI” in gaming, she had this to say: “AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be […] great stories are created by humans.” She added that she has “no tolerance for bad AI.” Okay. That’s a lot of executive speak, and the intentional obfuscation of game AI (such as NPC behavior, physics simulation, etc.) with the modern use of the term is a big red flag. The qualifier of “bad AI” isn’t exactly comforting, either—there’s a huge amount of wiggle room there. A lot of Windows users would consider Copilot, Microsoft’s flagship consumer and business LLM, to be “bad AI.” Yet that didn’t stop the company from proclaiming it the “best” Windows productivity app . I find it hard to believe that Microsoft won’t lean on LLMs to cut costs, with quality as a far second concern. It’s not as if they’d be the only ones to do that—AI slop is practically filling up the Steam store, and Epic’s perennially annoying CEO seems absolutely in love with the stuff , among many other triple-A bigwigs. Without some more defined terms, I find the statements given to Variety to be pretty meaningless. But Microsoft is desperate to get its gaming business in a better place as it fends off assaults from Sony and Nintendo on the console side and Valve on the PC side . Microsoft is still reportedly hoping to get a new AMD-powered Xbox out within the next few years… but if something doesn’t change, it could go the way of the Dreamcast.