Xbox's new chief once pictured herself as team doctor for the Green Bay Packers
Asha Sharma grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, worked on a golf course as a teenager and imagined a future in sports medicine. Instead she climbed through Microsoft, Facebook and Instacart, and in February 2026, with no background in video games at all, she was chosen to follow Phil Spencer at the top of Microsoft's gaming business.
Born in 1989 to parents of Indian descent who had come to the United States from New Zealand, Sharma was raised in Racine near relatives. Her parents divorced; her mother worked in a department store, while her father held a job at a family metal fabrication firm as he completed an engineering degree. She credits his attitude to work with shaping how she treated school and jobs.
Her first job, at S.C. Johnson, came at 17. She studied business at the Carlson School of Management in Minnesota, graduating in 2011, and fitted in internships, research trips to Hungary and Poland and a nonprofit that raised roughly $500,000. Microsoft's marketing department hired her after college; in 2013 she moved to the home services start-up Porch and rose to chief operating officer. From 2017 she ran product for Messenger and other private messaging tools at Facebook, and in June 2021 she became COO of Instacart, staying through its September 2023 listing at $42 a share.
Microsoft brought her back in March 2024 to lead product for its AI platform, and by September 2025 she headed the CoreAI organisation. Picking her to replace Spencer surprised observers, who had expected his deputy Sarah Bond to get the job, and critics pointed to her lack of games experience. Her record in winning new users weighed heavily, since console sales had been falling. In April 2026 the division itself was renamed Xbox.
Early decisions included a cheaper Game Pass Ultimate, which IGN welcomed, winding down Copilot on consoles and the Xbox app, and retiring the This is an Xbox campaign. In July 2026 she announced a restructure involving about 3,200 job cuts across fiscal 2027, with Compulsion Games and Double Fine becoming independent. A second-degree taekwondo black belt, she also started gaming under the tag AMRAHSAHSA to learn the industry from the player's side.
Source: Asha Sharma
