{"id":237341,"date":"2025-10-24T16:37:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/237341\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T16:37:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:37:07","slug":"phil-spencer-says-theres-no-top-down-mandate-to-use-ai-at-xbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/237341\/","title":{"rendered":"Phil Spencer Says There’s No ‘Top-Down Mandate’ To Use AI At Xbox"},"content":{"rendered":"

The AI arms race is currently eating up hundreds of billions of dollars in investment as companies compete over a technology whose exact benefits are still far from clear. Microsoft is at the center of that fight. How is the head of Microsoft gaming thinking about fitting AI into development<\/a>? \u201cOur AI use today is much more operational than it is in the creative space,\u201d Phil Spencer said during a recent panel discussion.<\/p>\n

As reported by IGN<\/a>, he was speaking at the Paley International Council Summit in Palo Alto, California on the topic of \u201cBig Ideas, Small Games: Creativity Beyond the Blockbuster\u201d with Double Fine studio head Tim Schafer following the release of Keeper<\/a>. Microsoft has been pushing AI into all of its products and CEO Satya Nadella has bragged about<\/a> relying on multiple AI assistants throughout the day to run one of the biggest tech firms in the world.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s less clear how those tools are being used by rank-and-file employees within the company, especially on the gaming side<\/a>.\u00a0According to Spencer, Microsoft gaming\u2019s biggest deployment of AI technology right now is in its platform moderation tools. The company announced last year<\/a> that it\u2019s been using AI tools to help flag and intercept offensive or spam-related communications on Xbox.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we have AI that we use to make sure that the conversation and topics that are happening, and for protected child accounts and other things and who gets to talk to those accounts to those people, is locked down by parents or guardians who are setting those controls,\u201d he said during yesterday\u2019s panel. \u201cThat\u2019s our primary use of AI inside of our organization today, which maybe isn\u2019t the most glamorous use of AI, but it\u2019s something that I fundamentally believe in.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to other applications on the player-facing front, Spencer suggested AI could also help with one of the biggest challenges in gaming right now: game discovery and curation. \u201cIt\u2019s not in practice today, but is there a way for us to use discovery based on things that you\u2019ve done in the past to surface the next thing that you might not know about that might be interesting to you?\u201d he speculated.<\/p>\n

When it comes to game development, however, Spencer seemed to downplay any significant use of AI tools when it comes to things like creating concept art, programming code, or scripting dialogue.\u00a0\u201cOn the creative side, I really leave it up to the teams,\u201d the executive said. \u201cI have found that creative teams will use tools that make their job easier when it makes their job easier, and any top-down mandate that \u2018Thou must use a certain tool\u2019\u2026is not really a path to success. I look at the teams, and we make tools available, and I kind of let it organically percolate.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued,<\/p>\n

On the production side, which I think is where a lot of people go\u2026we don\u2019t have any goals in our model for that to happen. I think more about the pace of creativity, maybe the number of things we can try and take risks on before we decide on our next opportunity. But our AI use today is much more operational than it is in the creative space.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a far cry from the promises that some gaming company executives are making about how AI can help them drastically cut costs and ship games more quickly and efficiently. Last year, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said AI was at \u201cthe very core<\/a>\u201d of the Madden and Battlefield publisher\u2019s business. That company is now reportedly banking on an AI<\/a> revolution to help it service a new $20 billion loan as part of a private equity buyout led by Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The AI arms race is currently eating up hundreds of billions of dollars in investment as companies compete…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237342,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,63,112106,61,6734],"class_list":{"0":"post-237341","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-microsoft","14":"tag-phil-spencer","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-xbox"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}