{"id":613111,"date":"2026-07-31T08:41:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T08:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/613111\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T08:41:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T08:41:14","slug":"companies-rethinking-approach-of-pushing-staff-to-just-use-ai-more-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/613111\/","title":{"rendered":"Companies rethinking approach of pushing staff to just use AI more \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some Amazon<\/a> developers must be suffering whiplash about how they use AI<\/a>. The technology group sets targets for most of its developers to use AI tools. This year it started monitoring consumption and posting usage figures on internal leader boards.<\/p>\n

But after the Financial Times wrote in May that some workers<\/a> were automating non-essential tasks to improve their ranking, Amazon took the leader boards offline. \u201cPlease don\u2019t use AI just for the sake of using AI,\u201d Amazon senior vice-president Dave Treadwell told staff.<\/p>\n

The shift was a sign of how employers are already changing how AI should be used and incentivised. As model providers switch from subscriptions to token-based billing, the cost of profligate usage is starting to hit home.<\/p>\n

Using leader boards and embedding token use in performance reviews is \u201ca really stupid way to do anything\u201d, Jacob Lauritzen, chief technology officer of legal AI firm Legora, said last month. \u201cReward [staff] for being effective and efficient and having more output, not for necessarily using AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the public launch of OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT in 2022, many corporate workers worried first about being caught \u201ccheating\u201d by using the powerful new tools. They were more likely to conceal their usage than boast about it. As the possibilities of generative AI became apparent, though, companies started to encourage wider use.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0AI \u2018co-workers\u2019 expected within three years, survey findsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In April 2025, for instance, Tobias L\u00fctke, chief executive of Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify, set \u201creflexive AI usage\u201d as \u201ca baseline expectation\u201d, building it into performance reviews. It said teams asking for additional staff would have to demonstrate why AI could not fulfil the task. Microsoft made AI use among developers mandatory and set usage as a core measure in employee appraisals.<\/p>\n

Consultancy Accenture said last year that workers who could not upgrade their skills for the AI age would be \u201cexited\u201d. By this February, it was tying the promotion prospects of senior staff to usage of its AI tools.<\/p>\n

Shoosmiths, the London-based law firm, offered a firm-wide \u00a31 million (\u20ac1.16 million) bonus if staff logged one million prompts on Microsoft Copilot in the year to March. This era of experimentation has given way to \u201ctokenmaxxing\u201d, with staff competing to use as many tokens as possible.<\/p>\n

The drive to delegate more tasks to AI, and to link the use of the new tools to employee reviews, has already disconcerted workers, and not only because they fear it threatens their own jobs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are pushing us to adapt our problems to the tool rather than the other way around. We\u2019re in a \u2018move quickly, adopt it fast, we\u2019ll see where we are later\u2019 mode,\u201d says one systems engineer, who prefers to remain anonymous.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Why workers are nostalgic for life before artificial intelligenceOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He adds that those embracing the approach can win recognition, but that the campaign has led to AI-induced errors that are time-consuming to repair.<\/p>\n

Another senior back-end software engineer says he is \u201cquite unhappy\u201d about AI usage as an official performance measure: \u201cIt removes my choice … It should be up to people like me to decide what\u2019s the best tool to use. I don\u2019t feel I should be penalised for not using a tool I don\u2019t feel like using.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ravin Jesuthasan, senior partner and global leader for transformation services at the human resources consultancy Mercer, says: \u201cThis year for the first time I started to see a maturing of the AI conversation. Now we need to see a return on it, rather than spraying and praying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking at an FT webinar on AI adoption last week, Tanuj Kapilashrami, chief operating officer at bank Standard Chartered (and co-author with Jesuthasan of the 2024 book The Skills-Powered Organization), said: \u201cI think the days of \u2018let a thousand flowers bloom\u2019, tech for the sake of tech, encouraging experimentation without it being rooted in the real commercial realities of your business … are gone for most businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, capping technology use is anathema at some companies whose prospects are firmly tied to the surge in AI use. Nvidia\u2019s chief executive Jensen Huang told the All-in podcast in March that he worried about his engineers using too few AI tokens. If an engineer being paid $500,000 a year \u201cdid not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed\u201d, he warned.<\/p>\n

\"\"Aer Lingus job cuts and Ryanair\u2019s profits plunge – what is happening in the Irish aviation sector?<\/p>\n

Jon Lester, IBM\u2019s vice-president of HR technology, data and AI, says: \u201cFor us, limiting innovation by putting arbitrary targets and limits on certain things is a very difficult conversation to have. We want [our] 270,000 people to come up with ideas they haven\u2019t had and deliver the next innovation that will change the way we work.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the costs of token usage increase and companies start to impose caps on AI use, some companies are putting in place routers that direct basic queries to open-source large language models or to less token-intensive AI versions. They are also developing more sophisticated ways to encourage the right sort of AI use.<\/p>\n

Boston Consulting Group\u2019s Kristy Ellmer, co-author of How Change Really Works, says that instead of putting \u201ca dollar value on creating a new ChatGPT skill, [you should ask] \u2018how many people are actually using that skill? Is it really creating value?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Rob Fisher, vice-chairman of professional services firm KPMG in the US, says: \u201cI\u2019ve always been a believer that carrots are quite a bit more powerful than sticks and so I think we\u2019ve tried to try to lean more to carrots.\u201d KPMG offers a dashboard where staff can compare usage and has instigated a quarterly \u201cAI Spark\u201d award for the brightest AI innovations.<\/p>\n

AllianceBernstein has installed a different set of incentives to encourage its asset managers to challenge the output of chatbots. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe say, how many times did you challenge what AI said? How many times did you override what it said? Did you capture that decision? Were you right most of the time? Were you wrong most of the time?\u201d Andrew Chin, chief artificial intelligence officer, told the FT\u2019s webinar.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0AI is turning everything into a software project \u2013 whether worthwhile or notOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

IBM ties its incentives to its training and development programme. Ten years ago, the group set a target of at least 40 hours of training a year for each employee. At that point the number of hours of actual training being done was 31 per worker. That has since increased to 87 and the target has been removed.<\/p>\n

The expectation is that \u201cyou will use [AI tools] to improve your productivity as an employee or as a team\u201d, says Lester. Usage and outcomes are monitored but there is no formal incentive \u2013 although Lester says the company may go back to staff and say \u201cour estimate would be that this [tool] should save you time; could you tell us as a group or a team why you aren\u2019t using it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Shoosmiths\u2019 1,200 staff hit their one million prompts target with four months still to run and claimed their bonus (the firm\u2019s 200 partners joined the AI push but were paid through a separate rewards scheme). The firm asked workers not to use AI to create images, partly to mitigate the environmental impact, and only to employ Microsoft\u2019s Copilot for \u201cthe business of law\u201d \u2013 such as research and drafting emails \u2013 not \u201cthe practice of law\u201d. Otherwise, they were free to experiment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just wanted people to use the technology; we were less concerned about what they did with it,\u201d says chief executive David Jackson. \u201cWe always knew that in year two it was going to be about AI fluency.\u201d <\/p>\n

The next firm-wide bonus will be paid if staff hit a target for accreditations to a tiered training scheme. Jackson says the firm has not asked people to slow down their prompting as token costs increase, \u201cbut because we\u2019re talking about purposeful usage, that\u2019s taken care of itself\u201d. \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some Amazon developers must be suffering whiplash about how they use AI. The technology group sets targets for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,1463,289,290,18,3492,19,17,1126,305,82,80],"class_list":["post-613111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-amazon","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ibm","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kpmg","tag-microsoft","tag-technology","tag-work"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}