It's in Duncan Trevithick's interest to be good at using AI at work - if he can use it to get more tasks done, faster, he'll qualify for a bonus at the end of the year. On the surface, it's a great incentive. But he's questioning what's really in it for him.
"The uncomfortable interpretation is that employees are being assessed on how effectively they can participate in their own redundancy," says Spain-based Trevithick, 34, who works in marketing for an AI training data company. But if he uses AI to take care of two days worth of work each week, he says the financial rewards don't add up. "I do not receive two days off or a 40% pay rise.
The higher output simply becomes the new baseline. In the short term, that may help me get promoted. In the longer term, I have helped prove how much of my job no longer requires me," he says.
"I'm just trying to view myself as a manager, and I'm managing some people, and I'm also managing AI agents, or AI loops, or whatever you want to call it." Using employees' AI abilities as a measure of whether they should get a bonus, promoted - or even sacked - is fast becoming more common. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet told the Rapid Response podcast in March: "Today, AI at Accenture is how we do work. So if you want to get promoted, you've got to do the things that we do in order to operate at Accenture." And big names like Disney, Meta, JP Morgan and KPMG have introduced "AI leaderboards" to track and rank employees' usage of the array of LLMs and platforms at their disposal, according to media reports, external.
Crypto trading platform Coinbase has already fired engineers who didn't complete AI training, as requested by the chief executive, Brian Armstrong, external. It demonstrates how eager business leaders are to see a return from their AI investments, especially when 94% of companies have yet to see significant value from AI, according to a report, external by consultants McKinsey. Employees feel they have to get on board, thanks to the current state of the jobs market - in the UK, vacancies have hit a five-year low.
Meanwhile, 75% of the 1,881 UK jobseekers polled in July by recruiter Gi Group say they would not be put off applying to an organisation that had introduced AI proficiency into individual performance reviews. Around 22% said it would be off-putting. "It's like being in the sea and you see a giant wave coming.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
