AI might be taking over the workplace, but Meta employees apparently won’t need to prove quite so enthusiastically that they’re using it anymore. Meta has updated its performance review guidance so employees will no longer be evaluated based on how much they use AI tools, according to a new WIRED report. The change moves the company away from language around AI usage and puts the emphasis back on something considerably simpler: the actual impact of an employee’s work.
It sounds obvious, but the distinction matters. Meta told workers last year that “AI-driven impact” would factor into how they were evaluated, which encouraged employees to incorporate chatbots and AI agents into their everyday jobs. Workers could also receive labels such as “AI Native,” “AI First,” or “AI Enabled” based on their adoption of the technology. The result, according to some employees, was a workplace where using AI could occasionally become a goal in itself.
The strange era of ‘tokenmaxxing’
Some Meta employees began prompting AI tools more frequently simply to increase their internal usage numbers. That included watching how many AI tokens essentially the chunks of information AI models process they consumed. Things became competitive enough that one employee created an internal leaderboard ranking colleagues by AI usage, complete with titles such as “Token Legend.” The leaderboard was eventually removed after details about it became public earlier this year.
Meta is now clarifying expectations. Engineers were told this week that AI adoption dashboards and token counts won’t be used to measure their impact. The updated performance-review language also says employee outcomes “can be supported by AI or other means,” meaning using AI is still very much encouraged, but it isn’t necessarily the point. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told WIRED that the company has always evaluated workers based on their contributions and said labels such as “AI Native” weren’t used for performance evaluations.
Meta isn’t exactly slowing down on AI
Don’t mistake the change for Meta suddenly becoming less interested in employees using artificial intelligence. If anything, the company’s workers are getting access to increasingly capable AI tools. Employees have recently been testing an experimental AI agent called Hatch on their corporate devices. Unlike a conventional chatbot that mostly responds to questions, Hatch can take actions on a computer, browse the web, and interact with other applications on a user’s behalf. It’s been available internally for several weeks and could eventually receive a public release.
That creates an interesting shift in Meta’s approach. Employees are still being encouraged to experiment with powerful AI systems, but simply racking up AI usage isn’t supposed to be the achievement anymore. Considering Meta reached the point where employees were competing to become “Token Legends,” judging the work rather than the token counter probably isn’t the worst reset.
