Companies have spent billions to crack AI. Getting employees to use it is vital to seeing those investments pay off. Enter: Ramped up goals and performance reviews.
In recent weeks, Business Insider has exclusively reported on the carrots and sticks companies from Big Tech to Wall Street are using to push workers to boost their productivity with AI.
Meta set goals for engineers and formed AI “pods,” while Google managers can mandate the use of assistants and agents. At JPMorgan Chase, internal dashboards track usage of AI tools, labeling workers as light, heavy, or non-users.
As Mark Zuckerberg told investors in January: “2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.”
Performance reviews — typically tied to raises and promotions — are a natural place for bosses to start. Companies eager to show a return on their massive AI investments are experimenting with new ways to secure worker buy-in. The challenge is that those same employees worry that working with AI means training their own replacements and getting caught up in the growing number of AI-driven layoffs. And then there’s simple inertia: It can be hard to change habits, especially across large organizations.
For now, companies are getting the ball rolling with incentives, gamification, tracking, and training. One JPMorgan software engineer paraphrased the overall message from their manager: “I think the most important thing right now is for you guys to just get familiar with the tooling. This is what the job’s going to look like no matter what.”
A need to prove AI’s value meets apprehensive employees
Companies are dialing up the heat on workers to adopt AI for a few reasons. First, they aren’t yet seeing returns on their AI investments, said Eric Ross, an analyst at investment research firm Cascend. “The vast majority are not getting any productivity,” he said.
They’re also worried competitors will figure it out faster and gain an edge, said analyst Brad Reback from brokerage and investment firm Stifel. “There’s the fear you’ll get left behind,” he said.
Finally, widespread adoption throughout the economy is important for companies that make and sell AI tools, said Reback. They “need significant amounts of adoption,” he said, to justify higher and higher spending, and showing internal buy-in of their own tools is a good start.
It’s also about signaling. Companies are urging workers to adopt AI so they can say in their public messaging that they’re keeping pace in the AI race and have an AI strategy, said Ross.
“It’s the appearance of not falling behind that is important to management,” he said.
As tech companies raise expectations for AI, engineers are typically the most affected. Meta, for example, set goals to achieve a certain percentage of AI-assisted code or tool adoption among developers. Google has told some engineers that using AI is part of their job expectations. However, firms are also starting to set expectations for non-technical staff. At Google, some are expected to use AI for strategy documents, sales call analysis, and customer insights.
At JPMorgan, updated goals that emphasize AI proficiency have been met with apprehension by some, especially given the bank’s culture of employee surveillance and data monitoring. The software engineer and a longtime technologist at the bank both said that AI has become an omnipresent part of their day amid increasing pressure to boost output.
“We all joke about it a lot,” the engineer said. “It’s like, ‘oh, we all have this degree that’s going to be useless in five years.’ “
Companies have been caught between emerging technology and worker apprehension before, said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at Stanford University. In the extreme, textile workers destroyed weaving machines during the Industrial Revolution because they feared the technology would take their jobs.
More recent waves of innovation — from mobile apps to e-commerce to enterprise software — were also met with resistance from workers, said Scott A. Snyder, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In retail, digital and in-store teams once operated in silos and sometimes competed, until companies reorganized around more unified models.
AI, however, touches nearly every role within organizations, making the challenge broader. To get workers to embrace change, Brynjolfsson and Snyder said employers need to adjust their messaging, build trust, and offer incentives. One way is to provide specific examples and templates for how employees can unlock value.
“That’s a little bit more work, but ultimately that’s the only way to do it,” Brynjolfsson said.
Meta’s AI “Transformation” weeks are one way the company is trying to jumpstart employee adoption with workshops and experiments with tools such as Claude Code. Googlers are similarly being encouraged to experiment with various AI tools and agents, including a popular one for coding that is internally named “Agent Smith.”
“It’s well-known that this is a priority and we’re focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work,” a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
As the cost of running these AI tools increases, another emerging idea is to offer AI compute as part of employee compensation packages. As greater access to AI provides a competitive edge, compute power becomes an incentive companies can dangle in front of staff and new hires, much like they already do with stock and bonuses.
‘Behavior change is about both skill and will’
A month after Jack Dorsey cited AI when laying off nearly half of Block’s employees, he gave more details on Tuesday about how the company is restructuring to eliminate middle management.
One person affected by Block’s February layoffs told Business Insider about the anxiety of using the AI they worry will take their job. “Over the last year that we were strongly encouraged to use all these AI tools, we were laying the foundations for our own replacement,” they said.
As anxiety over AI-fueled job losses intensifies, Snyder, the Wharton fellow, said, companies’ best bet is to show how the tech can enable employees to spend more time doing fulfilling work and less time on drudgery.
“If it’s just doing more with less, that’s not a very exciting proposition to most employees,” Snyder said. “This is really an opportunity to elevate everybody and multiply the impact.”
Give workers time to experiment with AI without fear of punishment, since “behavior change is about both skill and will,” he said.
Incentives can help, too, such as bonuses, recognition, or what he described as “gain sharing,” where employees keep part of the time or value they create with AI, rather than being assigned more work. Without that, he warned, adoption will stall. In the workplace, he said, friction is often less about stubbornness to adopt something new and more about trust.
“Employees, don’t trust AI enough yet to turn over parts of their job to it,” he said. Workers often need hands-on experience before they buy in.
“They’ve got to get to their own AI moment in their head,” he said. “Once they get to that epiphany, then it’s off to the races.”
