Amazon has shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work. Amazon’s official announcement said that it ended the leaderboard because it had accomplished its goal of encouraging employees to use AI tools, but multiple Amazon employees told me they suspect the company shut down the leaderboard because it was easily cheated and because it encouraged wasteful and expensive use of AI tools. Some of those employees acknowledged to me they deliberately cheated to climb the leaderboard’s ranks; in one case, an employee said they cheated after being told by management they weren’t using AI enough.
“The internal reasoning is ‘this leaderboard was to incentivize usage and adoption has reached a point where we’ve achieved our goal’ […] but my theory is that management wants to crack down on incentivizing overconsumption,” one Amazon employee, who uses Amazon’s AI coding tool Kiro and finds it useful, told me before Amazon announced the leaderboard shutdown. “I wouldn’t say ‘cheating’ is widespread but there are ways to use AI frugally and less frugally, and with the leaderboard there was an incentive to not bother trying to be efficient on token use.”
The Financial Times first reported Amazon’s scrapping of the leaderboard.
“The goal of the personal Kiro dashboard and the PhoneTool awards has been to create awareness about what AI can do to help accelerate development work,” Amazon’s internal announcement about shutting down the leaderboard said. “With so many people inside our organization now well versed into AI and [thousands] of total PhoneTool awards assigned, we believe the project reached its goals […] Thank you Amazon for making this project a success and happy coding.”
PhoneTool is an internal company registry, and PhoneTool awards are badges employees can display next to their name, kind of like video game achievements.
“Tokenmaxxing,” the idea held by some tech company executives that if employees are not maximizing their use of AI tools at work they are not being productive enough, has become common in the industry, with some bosses bragging about how they are spending more money on AI tool usage costs than actual human employees. This has resulted in a situation where some employees are running scripts that make it seem like they are using AI tools a lot to game metrics and appease their bosses, but the AI tools are not doing anything productive and are burning money and resources with no benefit to productivity.
One Amazon employee said they “cheated” their way up Amazon’s internal AI usage leaderboard after they were told in a performance review that they’re not using AI enough at work. They told me it was trivial to do so. I’m not providing exact details of how this employee cheated in order to protect their anonymity, but essentially employees can automatically prompt the AI tools with an endless series of tasks that have nothing to do with their job.
💡
Are you pressured to use AI at work? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.
“Honestly, iterating on that and maximizing the throughput was the most fun I’ve had at work,” this employee said. “I also do not think I was the only one gaming the system to make the number go up. My manager’s tone in that meeting made me think there were some internal discussions about the program driving waste.”
“One of the internal dashboards, called KiroRank, was recently created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work, and was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage’s sake,” an Amazon spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement. “The beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated. We’re focused on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company, and we’re proud of the way our teams are embracing this technology.”
Amazon also said it does not mandate teams to use AI tools or track their usage, but that it does measure token utilization to understand the cost and efficiency patterns.
The Amazon employees I talked to said that everyone at the company had access to the dashboard. One employee told me that many employee comments on the announcement called on Amazon to bring it back.
