Xbox lead vocalist Asha Sharma, despite having spent little more than two months on the job, is already singing sweet music to the long-beleaguered Xbox fanbase. In a post to X on Thursday, Xbox CEO Sharma said, “We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console.”
Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers.
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…— Asha (@asha_shar) May 5, 2026
The CEO, who previously served as president of product on Microsoft’s CoreAI team, added that Gaming Copilot doesn’t “align with where we’re headed.” Sharma has been saying all the right things since she took up the helm, and ending Copilot is certainly the right call.
But you shouldn’t interpret this as a death knell for all AI on Xbox—especially not the upcoming next-gen Project Helix.
Xbox Gaming Copilot launched in beta late last year, but Gizmodo’s own tests found it as useless as a sandbag in a porcupine reserve. The AI was supposed to offer guidance during gameplay using AI image recognition and a chatbot interface. But it often failed to understand the purpose of in-game items or to accurately relay default game controls. And it couldn’t offer an ounce of useful advice on how to adjust a game’s graphics settings to fit a device like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X.
As part of this new anti-Copilot declaration, the nascent Xbox CEO brought a few of her old buddies from her time on Microsoft’s CoreAI team into the fold. That includes the likes of Jonathan McKay, the former growth head of CoreAI, and Tim Allen, previously GitHub’s senior VP of design. Jared Palmer, who served as CoreAI’s VP of product and is now Xbox’s VP of engineering, wrote on X that he was “focused on building world-class tools, services, and experiences for developers and players across the Xbox ecosystem.”
Excited to share that I’m joining @Xbox as VP, Engineering & Technical Advisor to CEO @asha_shar
I’ll be focused on building world-class tools, services, and experiences for developers and players across the Xbox ecosystem.
Grateful for the opportunity and excited to get to… pic.twitter.com/6SMsfLqlOD
— Jared Palmer (@jaredpalmer) May 5, 2026
Inevitably, Palmer and Sharma will run headlong into the ongoing debate over when and how developers should use AI. Take Nvidia’s DLSS 5 as an example of how this can go wrong. Nvidia’s use of generative AI to slopify beloved video game characters was mocked by devs and gamers alike.
But not all AI is created equally. There’s a mountain of AI-centric features that players won’t ever notice when they load up their future console. The big one is AI-enhanced upscaling, in which software takes a frame rendered at a lower resolution, then expands and fills in pixels so it appears to have been rendered at a higher resolution. This enables better performance for demanding games on lower-end systems.
AMD, the company developing the next-generation chip for Project Helix, has already shared its work with Xbox on machine-learning-based upscaling. This upcoming “FSR Diamond” will also integrate additional features like ray regeneration, which helps make ray-traced lighting effects look less grainy. The $900 PlayStation 5 Pro and its recent PSSR update are already taking advantage of enhanced upscaling technology from AMD’s latest FidelityFX Super Resolution, aka FSR, models.
FSR Diamond will also integrate controversial AI-centric multi-frame generation, which essentially inserts one or several AI-generated frames between two rendered frames. It’s a way to boost overall frame rates, but it also jacks up latency and makes games feel floatier than they should. PC gamers have been far more vocal about “fake frames” than they are about the proliferation of upscaling.
