That’s according to a Financial Times (FT) report Tuesday (May 12), which said this usage of artificial intelligence (AI) for non-essential tasks is a way for staff to demonstrate to management that they are turning to the technology more often.
Sources familiar with the matter told the FT that Amazon has recently started to widely use its “MeshClaw” product internally, letting workers create AI agents that can complete tasks on a user’s behalf.
Some employees said their coworkers were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to boost their token consumption.
They said this was in response to pressure to adopt the tech as Amazon instituted targets for more than 80% of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year started tracking AI token consumption on what the FT report calls leaderboards, and what Amazon says are dashboards.
While Amazon had told staff that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance reviews, several workers said they believed managers were keeping tabs on the data.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
“Managers are looking at it,” said another employee. “When they track usage, it creates perverse incentives, and some people are very competitive about it.”
Reached for comment by PYMNTS, Amazon said the tool in question was developed by a small team and lets workers automate repetitive tasks, “freeing up time for employees to be more strategic and solve bigger customer problems.”
“We’re committed to the safe, secure and responsible development and deployment of generative AI for our customers,” the company added. “We welcome feedback from employees about their experiences with AI tools because their feedback helps us improve the quality of the tools we provide.”
The company said it has no central mandate that teams use AI tools, and that the company tracks token use to understand cost and efficiency but does not encourage it as a metric for developer’s performance.
This is playing out at a time when many workplaces are introducing AI without explaining to employees how to use it, as PYMNTS wrote Tuesday.
In an interview for PYMNTS’ Wage to Wallet podcast, Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards said that workers are hearing commentary about AI-related job loss, and assuming the worst when they don’t get context from their managers.
“If you’re a worker and what you’re hearing … is that nobody’s going to have a job in five years, that is scary stuff,” he said. “But I don’t think anybody should be naive enough to think that the job you’re doing today is not going to be impacted.”
