New Microsoft Xbox leadership reorg says goodbye to 26-year veteran Kareem Choudhry

As Microsoft continues to wrap its corporate arms around its $68B Activision acquisition, its Xbox division is wrangling with yet another shuffling of executive chairs and business priorities that’s resulted in veteran Kareem Choudhry leaving as the division purses growth in new avenues.

Choudhry, a 26-year veteran of the Xbox business is exiting stage left as of today due to ‘circumstantial’ reasons, according to reports from Windows Central. Choudry’s contributions include the development and marketing of the Xbox Series, the Xbox backward compatibility layer, Xbox Cloud Gaming and the formation of a new gaming AI division within Microsoft.

Choudhry’s AI gaming division is an internal project referred to as Xbox’s Emerging Tech team or XEmTech for short.

XEmTech will endure as Choudhry departs and be led by Roanne Sones, an OEM expert formerly from within Microsoft’s Windows business. XEmTech will shift into the fold of the Xbox hardware division proper with a rumored interest in developing some sort of handheld console for the business. Jason Ronald could accompany Sones and XEmTech alongside a pursuit of a handheld Xbox experience from his current position as Tech Advisor within the Xbox hardware division.

The folks over at Windows Centra managed to get insider information from an internal memo circulating in the Xbox division that positioning the new AI team under the general Xbox gaming hardware division should allow the overall business to “accelerate innovation”.

Additional re-org musical chairs consist of Ashely McKissick and Kevin Gammill promoted to heads of the newly established Xbox Experiences and Platforms division tasked with improving the overall Xbox experience between Windows and Xbox. The Xbox Experiences and Platforms team could be the link that many of the most recently Windows-powered handhelds have been looking for to make those experiences feel more native and less convoluted than they currently are.

After successfully navigating the Xbox and Activision regulatory process, Catherine Gluckstein will be promoted to lead of the Xbox Strategy and Regulatory team as Microsoft Advertising executive Jennifer Creegan moves to of Microsoft’s Gaming analytics and business planning division.

Microsoft’s Xbox division now has a much brighter spotlight on it following its $68B investment and will need to quickly justify its price tag plus its public fights with international regulatory bodies, hence the evolving reorg of the business. It’ll be interesting to see what the business brings forth in the second half of 2024 and into 2025 as a result of all this shuffling.