Amazon Tracking Employee Usage of AI

Interesting Article from the Information: "Amazon is among a growing list of tech giants that are tracking workers’ internal AI usage and using it as a factor in decisions on pay and promotions."

Amazon prides itself on being data obsessed, and its approach to tracking its own employees’ use of AI has been no different.

Amazon has been using an internal system called Clarity to track how often employees use AI tools in their work, two people with knowledge of the tracking said. (Clarity also tracks other things about employees, such as in-person office attendance, the people said.)

That includes data on overall AI usage by team and—for at least some managers—details on which AI tools people are using, including Amazon’s coding tool, Kiro. Amazon says it encourages employees to use its in-house AI tools as well as certain approved tools made by other companies.

"Understanding how employees adopt new technology helps us support them in using the latest tools to innovate in their day to day and deliver for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “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.”

Apart from tracking time spent on AI tools, some leaders in Amazon have been asking for more details on how employees are using AI to work more efficiently. That includes the company’s supply chain optimization technology team, known as SCOT, which has played a key role in managing costs in Amazon’s massive retail and logistics business, such as figuring out how to balance speedy delivery with keeping fulfillment costs low.

In that unit, assessments for all employees up for potential promotion now include questions about how they are using AI. Previously, questions on AI usage had only been included in assessment for promotions above L7, a middle management role. In a July memo announcing the change, Matt Taddy, vice president of SCOT, said it was made in part to align promotions with “impact, efficiency, execution and not org size.”

For instance, a new question for SCOT employees asks for a description of how that person used AI to “innovate, improve customer experiences, or enhance operational efficiency or effectiveness in their role or for their team,” including specific examples and measurable outcomes.

Amazon is among a growing list of tech giants that are tracking workers’ internal AI usage and using it as a factor in decisions on pay and promotions. In January, Meta told employees that performance reviews and bonuses would weigh metrics including generating code with AI tools. And Accenture recently started collecting data on employee AI logins and told staff that promotions to senior levels would require “regular adoption” of the technology.

In some cases, tech companies are encouraging employees to use the company’s in-house tools. Microsoft has told enterprise clients it will be “customer zero” for the AI tools it is selling, while telling some employees to increase their use of its AI coding tools to generate more of the code they write.

These kinds of tracking and performance management decisions can ruffle employees’ feathers, given that the changes sometimes highlight how well staffers are automating work currently done by humans. And in Amazon’s case, some of the efforts linking AI usage to promotions have come as the company is cutting corporate jobs, including 14,000 in October and another 16,000 in January—cuts the company said will reduce bureaucracy and make it operate more nimbly.

Amazon has said recent job cuts weren’t directly AI driven, with CEO Andy Jassy saying in an interview with The Information in January that “we announced some role reductions, people assumed it was just AI, because AI is kind of in the ethos of everything right now. And they just weren’t AI. They were really about our culture.” The company also continues to hire in high-priority areas.

Still, promotion assessments for people in Amazon’s SCOT unit who are already managers also ask how they have “accomplished more with less” and “specific examples of how they have remained innovative, force multiplied using AI and delivered results while reducing or not growing headcount,” according to the memo.

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