Amazon has dropped an internal initiative that sought to encourage employees to embrace AI tools after it emerged staff were using AI to complete what the Financial Times describes as “pointless” tasks.
The initiative, known as Kirorank, ranked Amazon employees in a leaderboard based on how often they used AI in their day-to-day work. However, with staff consuming tokens to complete low-value tasks, the company’s computing costs spiked.
The FT reports that Kirorank is now unavailable for use.
Dave Treadwell, Senior Vice President at Amazon, told staff the leaderboard was built with “good intentions” but encourages “tokenmaxxing” – the inflating of AI token consumption.
Tokens are the units of data processed by AI models. “Please do not use AI just for the sake of using AI,” Dave added.
Amazon says in a statement that “the beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated”. It adds that the leaderboard “was created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work”.
The Financial Times also reports that Meta employees have attempted similar gaming of internal tables by driving up token consumption.
