- Amazon wants 80% of its developers to use AI every week
- The company is even tracking AI token usage through internal leaderboards.
- Reluctant workers use AI when it is not necessary to simply inflate the numbers
Some Amazon employees are reportedly using the company’s internal AI platform, MeshClaw, to automate unnecessary or trivial parts of their work simply to increase internal AI usage metrics.
This comes as the company’s workers are being pressured from above to use more AI: Amazon wants four out of five of its developers to use the technology weekly and has since started tracking AI token consumption on internal leaderboards.
With worker adoption still relatively slow, many have turned to behavior described as ‘tokenmaxxing’ to artificially inflate their AI usage metrics, Financial times has reported.
Amazon workers pretend to use AI more than they actually do
MeshClaw is one of the company’s internal systems designed to support AI adoption, allowing employees to create their own AI agents to navigate software, coding, emails, and other common workflows.
But workers are now said to be optimizing their usage to maximize token count rather than useful results, ultimately leading to unnecessary AI calls that are driving up Amazon’s computing costs without delivering a true return on investment.
And it’s not just Amazon looking to drive AI adoption internally, but Meta, Microsoft and other companies are also reportedly gamifying adoption with internal leaderboards.
However, a recent study by engineering analysis firm Jellyfish (via Insider business information) reveals that while heavy AI users consumed around 10x more tokens than average, they only achieved a 2x increase in productivity.
By contrast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with the All-In Podcast that he would be “deeply alarmed” if workers like software engineers or AI researchers didn’t use half their annual salary in AI tokens annually — that’s $250,000 in tokens for a $500,000 worker.
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