{"text":[[{"start":7.45,"text":"Some Amazon developers must be suffering whiplash about how they use AI. 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."}],[{"start":22.35,"text":"But after the FT wrote in May that some workers were automating non-essential tasks to improve their ranking, Amazon took the leader boards offline. “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” Amazon senior vice-president Dave Treadwell told staff."}],[{"start":38.1,"text":"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. Using leader boards and embedding token use in performance reviews is “a really stupid way to do anything”, Jacob Lauritzen, chief technology officer of legal AI firm Legora, told the 20VC podcast last month. “Reward [staff] for being effective and efficient and having more output, not for necessarily using AI.”"}],[{"start":71.2,"text":"After the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, many corporate workers worried first about being caught “cheating” 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."}],[{"start":90.6,"text":"In April 2025, for instance, Tobias Lütke, chief executive of Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify, set “reflexive AI usage” as “a baseline expectation”, 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. Consultancy Accenture said last year that workers who could not upgrade their skills for the AI age would be “exited”. By this February, it was tying the promotion prospects of senior staff to usage of its AI tools. Shoosmiths, the London-based law firm, offered a firm-wide £1mn bonus if staff logged 1mn prompts on Microsoft Copilot in the year to March. This era of experimentation has given way to “tokenmaxxing”, with staff competing to use as many tokens as possible."}],[{"start":149.8,"text":"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. “They are pushing us to adapt our problems to the tool rather than the other way around. We’re in a ‘move quickly, adopt it fast, we’ll see where we are later’ mode,” says one systems engineer, who prefers to remain anonymous. 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. Another senior back-end software engineer says he is “quite unhappy” about AI usage as an official performance measure: “It removes my choice . . . It should be up to people like me to decide what’s the best tool to use. I don’t feel I should be penalised for not using a tool I don’t feel like using.” "}],[{"start":201,"text":"Ravin Jesuthasan, senior partner and global leader for transformation services at the human resources consultancy Mercer, says: “This 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.”"}],[{"start":217.15,"text":"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: “I think the days of ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’, 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.”"}],[{"start":243.85,"text":"Still, capping technology use is anathema at some companies whose prospects are firmly tied to the surge in AI use. Nvidia’s 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 “did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed”, he warned."}],[{"start":271.35,"text":"Jon Lester, IBM’s vice-president of HR technology, data and AI, says: “For 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’t had and deliver the next innovation that will change the way we work.”"}],[{"start":291.90000000000003,"text":"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. Boston Consulting Group’s Kristy Ellmer, co-author of How Change Really Works, says that instead of putting “a dollar value on creating a new ChatGPT skill, [you should ask] ‘how many people are actually using that skill? Is it really creating value?’”"}],[{"start":328.6,"text":"Rob Fisher, vice chair of professional services firm KPMG in the US, says: “I’ve always been a believer that carrots are quite a bit more powerful than sticks and so I think we’ve tried to try to lean more to carrots.” KPMG offers a dashboard where staff can compare usage and has instigated a quarterly “AI Spark” award for the brightest AI innovations."}],[{"start":348.95000000000005,"text":"AllianceBernstein has installed a different set of incentives to encourage its asset managers to challenge the output of chatbots. “We 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?” Andrew Chin, chief artificial intelligence officer, told the FT’s webinar."}],[{"start":371.70000000000005,"text":"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. The expectation is that “you will use [AI tools] to improve your productivity as an employee or as a team”, says Lester. Usage and outcomes are monitored but there is no formal incentive — although Lester says the company may go back to staff and say “our estimate would be that this [tool] should save you time; could you tell us as a group or a team why you aren’t using it?”"}],[{"start":411.35,"text":"Shoosmiths’ 1,200 staff hit their 1mn prompts target with four months still to run and claimed their bonus (the firm’s 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’s Copilot for “the business of law” — such as research and drafting emails — not “the practice of law”. Otherwise, they were free to experiment. “We just wanted people to use the technology; we were less concerned about what they did with it,” says chief executive David Jackson. “We always knew that in year two it was going to be about AI fluency.” "}],[{"start":452.5,"text":"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, “but because we’re talking about purposeful usage, that’s taken care of itself”."}],[{"start":476.65,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783927591_2777.mp3"}