This person was appointed vice president of engineering under Asha Sharma, the new head of Xbox. However, it seems the grass is greener elsewhere.

Jared Palmer was chosen to work directly with CEO Asha Sharma to tackle the division’s most complex challenges. However, he has taken a job at Cognition, an AI company. Just two months after being appointed vice president of engineering and technical advisor to Asha Sharma, Palmer is now the former vice president of engineering and former technical advisor to the CEO. Palmer announced on LinkedIn that he joined Cognition as vice president of engineering.

“I’m grateful to Asha and everyone at Microsoft and Xbox for an amazing year. Excited for this next chapter,” he wrote in a brief message. “Cognition operates Devin, the first autonomous software engineer. Devin plans, writes, tests, and ships production code on its own, working inside your codebase and the tools your team already uses,” according to the company’s website.

AI is clearly Palmer’s area of expertise. Prior to his brief stint at Xbox, he was vice president of product at Microsoft’s CoreAI division, which Sharma led before taking over at Xbox. That was also a relatively short tenure, lasting just eight months. Before that, Palmer spent about four years as vice president of AI at Vercel, an AI infrastructure company. When Palmer was appointed, Sharma said that he would work directly with her on the most complex product and engineering challenges, with a particular focus on developer tools, aesthetics, and infrastructure.

This is quite a challenge, and we assume that some of these complex problems will remain unsolved. You shouldn’t read too much into things like this. Cognition is probably a better fit for him than a struggling video game platform, and they probably offered him a lot of money. Nevertheless, it doesn’t make a good impression when we lose someone who was specifically chosen for such a key role after barely two months on the job.

Source: PCGamer, LinkedIn, Cognition