Phil Spencer: Xbox isn’t mandating AI for creatives, and is seeing good growth in Japan

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has said the company’s current use of AI is chiefly for security and Xbox Live moderation, and there is no mandate for it to be used in the creative process. He separately highlighted the brand’s improved reach in the historically challenging Japanese market.

In a panel discussion at the Paley International Council Summit in California, as reported by IGN, Spencer said the company’s primary use of AI was for moderating voice and text chat “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”. He described it as “[not] the most glamorous use of AI, but something I fundamentally believe in.”

He said the company has left decisions on wider use of AI to individual teams within the organization. “On the creative side, I really leave it up to the teams,” he said. “I 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 ‘Thou must use a certain tool’…is not really a path to success. I look at the teams, and we make tools available, and I kind of let it organically percolate.”

Spencer expressed interest in how AI could assist in content discovery, by making recommendations based on user history, but said there were no plans for its use in production.

“On the production side, which I think is where a lot of people go…we don’t 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.”

This approach stands in contrast to EA’s announcement in the same week of a partnership with StabilityAI, following a recent Business Insider article alleging staff pushback to a top-down mandate to use AI across the business as part of a full-throated commitment to the technology. The Financial Times has reported that AI-derived cost savings are a foundational plank of the company’s proposed buyout by a consortium including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

In a previous conversation at TGS now reported by Famitsu, Spencer highlighted the company’s commitment to the Japanese market, which includes Microsoft Game Studios serving as the publisher for Ninja Gaiden 4 and Hideo Kojima’s OD, and said that it had seen audience growth in the region..

“The number of hours played on Xbox in Japan has grown by about 20% over the past year,” he said. “This figure includes console, PC, and cloud play. So, looking at these numbers, we expect that if we provide content for Japanese players, that will continue to grow.”

The increase will be to a low number, given the platform’s historically poor performance in the territory, and supported by a more generous definition of what counts as an Xbox. The company’s latest move towards a more platform-agnostic future was the announcement of Halo releasing on PS5.