Xbox CEO Asha Sharma Launches XBOX LABS to Trial AI Game Ports and Web Builds

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has stood up XBOX LABS, a new internal team charged with turning “emerging ideas” into things players and developers can try, from AI-assisted game ports to browser-playable builds.

In a message to Team XBOX this morning, Sharma called the unit “a small group of game makers, engineers, and scientists” whose job is rapid development, iteration, and testing. A company spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz that no new staff have been hired; XBOX LABS is a centralization of ongoing R&D work, in the same spirit as last week’s Xbox XP announcement.

The team’s known focus areas match the trends Sharma cited: porting games to Apple silicon, distributing builds through the browser via WebGPU (now at roughly 90% global support), and supporting game modders. Some projects may reach Xbox Insiders; others may never reach players, since the unit has no fixed release path.

Sharma framed the move against 72 billion hours of Xbox play a year and the recent wave of AI-driven decompilations putting Windows PC games on Apple Silicon. “We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating,” she wrote.

The announcement does not change the four 2027 priorities Sharma laid out last week: a console-led platform, growing franchises, Minecraft as a creator platform, and extending Xbox worlds. “LABS gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway,” she said.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report