New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has announced the plans to halt the development of Xbox’s AI chatbot Copilot, which was rolled out into beta last year. This comes as part of the many changes that have taken place at Xbox since Sharma took over as CEO following Phil Spencer’s departure in February.
Xbox makes major changes in gaming copilot
Microsoft has decided to halt the development of its AI chatbot Copilot for Xbox consoles. Asha Sharma, the newly appointed CEO of Xbox, announced this in an X post, detailing the reason for this decision.
Sharma, who took over from Phil Spencer in February of this year, wrote on X, “Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers.” She continued, “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 back on track.”
“As part of this shift, you’ll see us begin to retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed. We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console,” Sharma further added in her post.
This announcement came shortly after IGN announced an internal leadership shift that moves four members of Microsoft’s CoreAI team to Xbox.
Gaming Copilot was set to bring AI integration to Xbox consoles and the Xbox app on phones. It was visualized as a gaming “sidekick” that could help out in various aspects of video games. These include getting tips, information, or even game recommendations.
This decision not to roll out Copilot is a rather recent one. Product manager Sonali Yadav had spoken about Copilot at this year’s Game Developers Conference in March. “I’m excited to announce that later this year, we will bring Gaming Copilot to the current-generation consoles, and we will continue to bring it to more services that players are playing,” she had said (via Gamesradar).
Originally reported by Sourav Chakraborty on Mandatory.
