Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
Using AI at work is becoming an expectation. Measuring it is proving far more complicated.
As corporate America pours billions into AI software and agents, executives have ramped up efforts to measure adoption, monitor workflows, and pressure workers to integrate AI into their daily jobs.
From JPMorgan to Meta, companies have built dashboards and tools to track how employees use AI. And, in some cases, companies are capturing employee data needed to train their own AI systems.
As AI use becomes a workplace metric, however, new tensions are emerging.
Some employees are finding ways to inflate their AI usage and game internal rankings, while others are pushing back and calling for more privacy guardrails.
The rise of the AI dashboard
Rising AI costs have executives seeking proof that their investment is being put to good use and that workers are actually using the tech.
Many companies are turning to internal dashboards that track AI usage among teams and individual employees. Some of these dashboards are also made public internally so that workers can see how much their colleagues are using AI.
For some employers, measuring AI adoption has become a way to identify laggards, compare workers, and influence decisions about performance.
JPMorgan, Meta, and KPMG are among the companies that have set up internal dashboards to monitor how much employees use the technology.
Tracking employees at such a granular level, though, has backfired in some cases as workers embrace "tokenmaxxing," the strategy of using more AI tokens than necessary to rig the metrics in your favor.
This kind of behavior is a growing concern for companies as AI costs skyrocket, leading some to reconsider how they use AI dashboards.
Amazon had an employee-created leaderboard that tracked AI-token use, but shut it down in late May after concerns that it encouraged workers to use AI unnecessarily to improve their rankings.
Surveillance in the AI era
For years, workplace surveillance tools focused largely on productivity, tracking logins, mouse movements, screenshots, and time spent online, particularly amid the rise of remote work.
AI, however, is changing what companies want to monitor.
They are watching how employees actually work, how they write, code, communicate, make decisions, and move through tasks.
This shift is partly driven by the rise of AI agents, software systems capable of completing tasks with limited human oversight.
Capturing data about how employees work can help employers understand who is using AI effectively. It can also help train companies' own AI systems.
Meta, for example, said in an internal memo in April that it would start to monitor the mouse movements and keystrokes of its employees so that it could use the data captured to train their AI systems.
Pushing AI adoption
As tracking AI use becomes more common, some companies are using the data to inform decisions about promotions, performance, and even job security.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said earlier this year that using AI is now required to move up within the firm.
Other companies are trying to incentivize workers by offering cash and other prizes.
KPMG, for example, launched a program earlier this year for its US advisory division that awards cash prizes to employees who use AI to generate new, innovative ideas for the business.
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