Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is going all-in on artificial intelligence — and he's bringing some big names from Silicon Valley and the gaming world along for the ride.

On Thursday, the Fed announced the creation of five external task forces designed to help the central bank navigate a rapidly changing economy. One of those groups is squarely focused on AI, and its membership reads like a who's-who of tech and economics.

The AI task force will be led by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and a prominent AI booster. Joining him are Charles I. Jones, a Stanford economist known for his work on economic growth, and Asha Sharma, the newly appointed CEO of Microsoft's Xbox division. That's right — the head of one of the world's biggest gaming platforms will help the Fed figure out how AI is changing the economy.

According to the Fed, the task force will “assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments.” In plain English: they're going to study whether AI is a big enough deal to change how the Fed sets interest rates.

Warsh has been pretty clear about where he stands. He's argued that AI could allow the U.S. economy to grow faster without triggering inflation — a kind of free lunch that central bankers usually don't believe in. Earlier this year, he suggested that advances in AI could eventually support lower interest rates. In June, he called AI adoption “perhaps as important a change in the economy and business and households that we've had in my adult lifetime.”

But not everyone at the Fed is ready to pop the champagne. Minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee's June meeting showed that policymakers acknowledged AI's potential to boost productivity but said there remains “considerable uncertainty” over both the timing and scale of those gains. In other words, AI might be a game-changer — or it might take a while to show up in the data.

The timing of the task force is interesting, because the tech industry is in the middle of a messy transition. Companies are pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but they're also cutting jobs at a rapid clip. More than 81,000 jobs were cut in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Just this month, Microsoft announced plans to cut 4,800 jobs, including about 3,200 roles at Xbox. The layoffs at Xbox are happening in two waves: 1,600 immediately and another 1,600 over the next year.

So while Warsh is optimistic about AI's potential to create a more productive economy, the human cost of that transition is already visible.

The other four task forces cover communications, balance sheet policy, data, and inflation frameworks. Here's who's leading them:

• Communications: University of Washington professor Peter R. Fisher, former Brazilian central bank chief Arminio Fraga, and former Bank of England Gov. Mervyn King.
• Balance Sheet Policy: Harvard economist Karen Dynan, former Reserve Bank of India Gov. Raghuram Rajan, and former Federal Reserve Gov. Jeremy Stein.
• Data: Harvard economist Raj Chetty, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, and University of Chicago economist Kevin Murphy.
• Inflation Frameworks: Harvard economist and former White House adviser Greg Mankiw, Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Sargent, and former Bank for International Settlements economic adviser William White.

It's a star-studded lineup, and it shows that Warsh is serious about bringing outside expertise into the Fed's often-insular world. Whether AI lives up to the hype — and whether the task force's work actually changes how the Fed sets policy — remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the central bank is no longer treating AI as a distant possibility. It's a force that's already reshaping the economy, and the Fed wants to understand it.