Asha Sharma is a technology executive who became Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft Gaming in February 2026, taking over the Xbox business and reporting directly to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. Her background is in consumer technology and artificial intelligence rather than games.
Sharma first worked at Microsoft in a marketing role in the early 2010s, then held senior product positions elsewhere, including roughly four years as a vice president of product and engineering at Meta, where she worked on messaging products, and a stint as chief operating officer of the grocery-delivery company Instacart, which she joined in 2021. She returned to Microsoft in February 2024 as president of its CoreAI division before moving across to lead the gaming business two years later.
Her appointment drew attention because she had no prior experience in the video game industry, a break from the Xbox tradition of promoting from within gaming. She took the role during a difficult stretch for the division, following a January 2026 impairment charge in Microsoft's gaming business and a year-over-year decline in gaming revenue. Alongside Matt Booty, promoted to Chief Content Officer, she signaled a "reset" for the business in an internal memo to staff. As of mid-2026 she had not made a public statement on the game-preservation and backward-compatibility commitments associated with her predecessor.