The United States central bank, the Federal Reserve, has announced new task forces to “advance the conduct of monetary policy,” and its board has chosen Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to help guide one task force pertaining to AI, as part of a wider effort to help create jobs and keep prices stable.
The new Productivity and Jobs task force will look into the “economic impact of new general-purpose technologies,” including AI, to help the Fed make better policy decisions. Sharma is joined on this task force by billionaire businessman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, along with Stanford University economics professor Charles I. Jones–he is currently on leave from the university to become a scholar-in-residence at the AI company Anthropic.
Fed chairman Kevin Warsh said the new task forces are part of the group’s “commitment to price stability and maximum employment.”
Sharma, for her part, recently oversaw huge Xbox price hikes and mass layoffs at Xbox that people reacted negatively to. These dramatic changes came against the backdrop of the entire consume electronics industry managing the ongoing memory and component shortages that have eaten into margins.
“We are in a hardware component crisis. When I joined as CEO in February, the price we paid for console storage components was over 2x as high as we paid last fall,” Sharma said. “These costs have since doubled again. And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier. Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory. While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade. We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix.”
On the AI part, Sharma, 37, comes from an AI background at Microsoft. She has promised no “soulless AI slop” at Xbox under her leadership, and she has canceled some AI plans for Xbox already.
The Fed’s new task forces will “operate independently,” the Fed said. They will attempt to “follow the evidence, provide candid feedback, and produce rigorous findings.”
The other task forces include ones dedicated to improving the Fed’s communications, examining costs and benefits generally, bettering the quality and timeliness of key economic data points, and revisiting how the Fed tracks and reacts to inflation.
The Xbox “reset” that was announced this week included 1,600 Xbox layoffs, with 1,600 more to come. Microsoft also got rid of five studios and canceled games, including Avowed 2. This was all done because Sharma said the Xbox business was not healthy and was in need of major changes.