Recently appointed Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has been tapped by the US government to advise the Federal Reserve on "productivity and jobs" as well as matters related to AI and its impact on the economy.
Via press release published on an official government website, the Fed details five distinct taskforces, each co-led by a team of "external advisers" "with a mandate to follow the evidence, provide candid feedback, and produce rigorous findings for the Federal Open Market Committee." Essentially, the taskforces will advise the Federal Reserve on economic policy across five different categories: Communications, Balance Sheet Policy, Data, Inflation, and Productivity and Jobs, which is where Sharma has been assigned.
The Fed says it chose "accomplished economists, business leaders, and former central bank practitioners—with deep expertise in their fields," to head up the taskforces. Sharma's team will "assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments."
Sharma is the only active CEO to join the taskforces, although former Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillion has been named adviser to the Federal Reserve on the data taskforce.
This is a peculiar move for Sharma and Xbox for several reasons. For one, just this week Sharma herself wrote an email to employees announcing mass layoffs at Xbox that will result in 3,200 cut jobs by the end of the 2027 fiscal year amid a major "reset" for the brand which she'll be integral in spearheading.
But perhaps even more chiefly, Sharma has been the CEO of one of the largest gaming companies in the world for just a few short months and she's been making big moves. It's surprising she has the time, much less the mental space, to help out the federal government with its economic policy.
Before she was CEO at Xbox, Sharma was president of Microsoft's CoreAI product group, which is likely where she gained the experience that caught the Fed's attention. Previously, she was COO at Instacart.
