AI use is no longer optional if you work in tech.
While many sectors are still experimenting with artificial intelligence, the tech industry has moved to the next phase: tracking their workers’ use of AI tools—and enforcing it if they have to.
From small startups to giants including Amazon.com, Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms, tech companies are measuring it with an eye on productivity gains and in certain cases factoring it into performance reviews. For some jobs, candidates aren’t even considered unless they can demonstrate AI fluency.
“We are using carrots and sticks,” says Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of Conductor, a 300-person digital marketing startup. “The only way to have a thriving company is if you have all your staff having a high level of competency.”
Besmertnik started considering AI use as part of performance reviews at the beginning of this year for his whole company. Employees get an AI competency score from one to five—scoring a five if they create systems that improve the workflow of others. He has also created a new award: Whoever comes up with the most effective AI-driven process wins a vacation stipend worth several thousand dollars.
He won’t consider hiring candidates without AI fluency. (During interviews, two people sit in to evaluate AI skills.) Candidates interviewing with Conductor can expect to be tested on their ability to solve sample problems using AI. They are asked to explain their choice of tool, the prompts they used and how they would have done things differently six months ago.
Around 42% of tech-industry workers said their direct manager expects AI use in day-to-day work as of last October, up from 32% just eight months before, according to a survey from AI consulting firm Section. And nearly half of tech and telecom companies are already reporting a positive return on their generative-AI investments, compared with 35% across all industries, according to a recent survey by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and market research consulting firm GBK Collective.
Even in an industry that tends to drive workplace trends, AI adoption hasn’t been easy. Tech workers have many of the same feelings about AI as the broader population, including skepticism about how much time it’s actually saving them. There’s also the added anxiety of hearing their own CEOs talking about how AI will ultimately lead to smaller workforces.
“In tech it’s amplified,” says Jeremy Korst, a co-author of the Wharton report. “Do we really think employees are going to broadly adopt this if they believe it’s going to cause them to eventually lose their job?”
Companies can mandate and measure AI use but driving adoption tends to happen by encouraging a culture of experimentation that celebrates wins and failures. That’s much harder to do in large organizations and not everyone does it well, Korst says.
Several of the largest tech companies are actively measuring employee use of AI.
Managers of software developers at Amazon Web Services have a dashboard that outlines engineer AI-tool usage. And while the use isn’t factored into performance reviews, managers do consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions, according to a person familiar with the matter. (Amazon’s tracking of employee AI use was earlier reported by The Information.)
“We focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company—whether that’s during a review process or throughout the year,” says an Amazon spokeswoman, adding that employees are expected to use resources including AI to help teams become more effective.
Google is this year for the first time factoring AI use into some employee performance reviews for software engineers, according to people familiar with the matter. Teams and managers have discretion to evaluate AI use as part of performance based on individual roles and responsibilities, but they aren’t required to, according to a Google spokeswoman. She added that the company encourages all employees, regardless of role or level, to incorporate AI tools into their daily work.
Meta’s new performance review system will take AI use into account, according to people familiar with the matter. The system can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI and includes AI tools that provide individuals with insights about their own impact, which they can use for self-evaluations. (The company’s plans were earlier reported by Business Insider and The Information.)
At Microsoft, managers are including questions about AI use in performance discussions. Employees are supposed to quantify how they are using AI tools in their workflows.
Salesforce added an AI fluency progress tracker to an internal dashboard late last year. While the company doesn’t have specific AI metrics employees have to hit to earn a strong performance review, usage of the new tools and performance are intertwined, according to a spokeswoman. If you’re not using AI, you’re most likely underperforming.
“We definitely measure adoption,” says Joe Inzerillo, Salesforce’s president of enterprise and AI technology. “We’re incessant about looking at the data.”
Unlike deploying traditional software where you launch it and people just use it, AI is more complicated to roll out. The company’s philosophy over the past year has effectively been to experiment and iterate: The best tools naturally rise to the top and get adopted widely. There comes a tipping point where enough people are using a tool and then the mandate comes.
Employees, for example, can now file for paid time off only by interacting with an AI agent. Most self-evaluations and performance reviews, too, are done with the assistance of an agent. Inzerillo says “basically 100%” of employees use AI in some capacity.
The pressure to have your employees widely adopt AI is especially acute within large tech companies, says Brian Elliott, who advises companies on the future of work.
“These guys are spending a ton of money creating these tools in the first place—so the Microsoft, Amazons, Googles,” he says. If they can’t get them to work well within their own walls, it’s harder to sell them to customers. “You need to show there’s ROI,” he adds.
When it comes to getting employees to adopt AI, Andrew Anagnost, the CEO of software maker Autodesk, says access was the biggest hurdle. Some coding tools, including Cursor, were initially blocked and employees were using them stealthily.
Instead of dumping tools on employees, the company focuses on specific workflows that AI can improve. But there will always be a small number of AI holdouts, he says. “They probably won’t survive long term.”
Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com and Katherine Blunt at katherine.blunt@wsj.com
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