Former Instacart, CoreAI exec to lead Xbox's subscription and cloud business

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma has shaken up the gaming leadership team, appointing four new leads that previously worked at Instacart and Microsoft's CoreAI teams.

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New developments at team Xbox today, as CNBC reports big changes at the gaming group's upper management. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has hired four new people to help lead transformational change and deliver better profits and future-oriented growth.

Three of these new hires had positions at Microsoft's OpenAI division, and the fourth worked at Instacart--the former head of growth for ChatGPT is now the head of growth for Xbox, and Instacart's synonymous exec is now leading the general Xbox subscription and cloud business. The memo also confirmed that two long-time Xbox veterans, Kevin Gammill and Roanne Sones, will also be leaving after 24 years at Microsoft.

The memo goes over the new leadership team, which includes:

• Tim Allen, previously CoreAI VP of design, will also serve as a design lead for Xbox
• Jonathan McKay, previously head of growth for ChatGPT and OpenAI, now head of growth at Xbox
• Evan Chaki, previously general manager at CoreAI, will oversee a team of high-level engineers
• David Schloss, previously Instacart's director of product and growth, will lead Xbox subscription & cloud
• Jared Palmer, previously CoreAI VP of product, who will work on product, engineering, developer tools and infrastructure

"We need to evolve how we work and how we are organized across our platform. Right now, it is too hard to ship impact quickly. We spend too much time inward instead of with the community, and we lack the depth we need in some of the fundamentals,"Sharma said in the memo.

This marks the biggest shake-up to the higher-end management team since the departure of former Xbox president Sarah Bond, and the retirement of Xbox CEO Phil Spencer.

It seems to be a changing of the guard at Xbox as Microsoft seeks growth in its gaming segment, especially after the largest-ever tech acquisition of all time with the $70 billion Activision buyout.

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Xbox's current CEO has admitted the games division has faced turbulence as of late, with the last Q3'26 quarter delivering the lowest-ever Xbox console revenues of all time, and a total segment drop of -$380 million throughout the period.

Microsoft recently reduced the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $23/month in a bid to boost revenues and preserve the profitability of its golden goose asset (Call of Duty).

At the same time, Sharma has also said that Xbox has "made progress expanding margins," possibly indicating that the pivot towards Game Pass has largely been successful insofar as more direct profit-oriented conversion of access points.