Microsoft is Sending Out Emails that Provide Further Insight Into What Xbox Labs is

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced a new subsidiary within its gaming division called Xbox Labs. Asha Sharma, Xbox’s current CEO, sent out a message to all Team Xbox employees worldwide explaining what this subsidiary is. To be honest, though, her statements left readers with more questions than answers.

Sharma described Xbox Labs as a “small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience.” She then added that Microsoft will “build in the open” and “learn from what people do,” while determining the success of these experiences by “whether more people are playing and creating.”

In the message that Sharma sent out, there is not a single mention of the phrase “artificial intelligence.” But, as most people have pointed out, she very much seemed to be alluding to the rising relevance of AI in her statements. Sharma mentioned how fans have managed to rapidly de-compile games and translate Windows PC builds to run on browsers and Apple Silicon. The thing that she perhaps intentionally left out, however, is that all of this was made possible with the advent of AI-driven game development and coding.

Xbox Labs is Currently Shrouded in Mystery

Many have taken Sharma’s statements to mean that Xbox Labs is going to involve AI somehow. Maybe Microsoft will use AI to create experiences similar to the ones that fans are already making. But what kinds of experiences? We don’t know exactly.

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet recently shared a video with fans on his X account showing the Xbox 360 game dashboards running natively in the Microsoft Edge browser. As cool as this is, this didn’t really show us what the point of Xbox Labs is. After all, what could fans even do with a console dashboard that’s not on a console?

I've been cooking up retro vibes in XBOX LABS. Tell @asha_shar and I your favorite era! pic.twitter.com/GOEUJzF6sW

— Scott Van Vliet (@scottvanvliet) October 20, 2026

The official Xbox Labs website is similarly vague. All it includes is a few toggles and looping videos, along with an option to enter your email and get updates about the program. Microsoft has sent out emails to fans who have signed up on the Xbox Labs website, which provide a little bit more context on what people can expect from the newly-established subsidiary.

Emails Suggest that Xbox Labs Will Be Creating Playable, Game-Like Experiences

Power Up Gaming has obtained one of these emails from Microsoft, courtesy of X user @HERESJOHNNY61, that contains a brief description of the Xbox Labs program. It states the following: “You’re on the list. We’re building the first XBOX Labs experiments right now, and we’ll email you as soon as there’s something to play.”

The key word here, of course, is “play.” Judging by what this email says, it appears that the experiences that the Xbox Labs team is working on are playable games of some kind. They may be more like demos rather than fully-fledged games, however, as it’s unlikely that Microsoft would allow people to play games entirely for free. It’s hard to say what these experiments will be, but they could be something along the lines of user-created mods, as well ports of popular games to unconventional platforms.

The video that Scott Van Vliet shared of Xbox dashboards being usable inside a browser was likely just a test to show what the Xbox Labs team is capable of. You can’t really “play” a dashboard, though, so players probably shouldn’t expect most of the experiences that come out of Xbox Labs to look like this. They could be much more different than what some people are expecting.