JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s decision to let managers use artificial intelli
gence for help writing performance reviews stands to bring relief to one of bosses’ most dreaded annual tasks. It also raises questions as to whether bot-written
reviews will make the process better or worse, especially for employees seeking meaningful feedback.
Bringing AI into annual assessments can save managers time, and even result in more useful feedback than emplo
yees get from human bosses alone, executives and management experts say. Yet they caution that outsourcing too m
uch could turn reviews into AI workslop. (At any rate, bot-written reviews
are already out there whether employers bless them or not, with many managers making up their own rules.)
“The boundaries are going to be redrawn with this technology shift,” said Benjamin Levick, who leads AI and operations at corporate card company Ramp
. “I don’t know if they’ll be full-blown uncomfortable or feel dehumanizing. There’s of course a risk of that if you’re very clunky with how you utilize AI, but I d
o think that there’s a way to thread the needle of infusing AI in more managerial practices.”
JPMorgan’s guidelines permit supervisors to use an internal chatbot to help compose their write-ups, but warns them that technology is “not a substitute for human
judgment.” It also forbids them from using AI tools to assign performance scores or make pay or promotion decisions.
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Time-strapped managers may be doing their direct reports a disservice if they don’t use available tools to more thoroughly evaluate employees’ work, Levick said.
“I’d feel pretty bad if an AI just wholesale read everything that I wrote, looked at everything I did, and just assigned m
e a grade, and then my manager read the script at the end,” Levick said. “That’s the wrong way to do it, but I would probably also feel bad, honestly, if my manager only has a
couple few hours to do this process and they spent all the time painstakingly manually reading the 2% of things they c
ould get through and then wrote a review based on that very small subset.”
Bosses, like all humans, are prone to bias and faulty memory a
nd may put too much weight on the recent past when reviewing a longer period, said Peter Cappelli, a manage
ment professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and director of its Center for Human Resources. Ca
ppelli said AI often can provide a more objective assessment than one you get from a human manager.
That said, employees may consider a review to have less credibility if they know AI was involved. “I get a reason to di
scount this and not pay any attention to it because I don’t think it
actually came from my boss,” Cappelli said. “It said I did a good job. Does the boss really think that?”
Experimental studies have shown that when people are given
AI tools, they often offload analysis to the technology and rely less on their own judgment. That can cut both ways in a performance review. Employees may feel processed rather than personally evaluate
d, deepening cynicism toward a review process many already see as performative, Cappelli said. And because chatbots are known to be sycophantic, an AI-assisted review may be overly positive and fail to adequately address performance issues (one of many reasons why it’s a good idea to check any AI-written material for fairness, tone and accuracy).
The pros and cons, plus the newness of AI, suggest companies will wrestle with their choices well beyond this pe
rformance review season. The decisions may be more clear-cut at companies now explicitly assessing how much or how well employees use AI, which is now part of the review criteria at companies including consulting firm KPMG LLP and e-commerce platform Shopify Inc.