June 4, 2026 Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work. While the company said the initiative had achieved its goal of encouraging AI adoption, several employees believe it was retired because it was easy to game and encouraged wasteful use of AI resources.
The leaderboard tracked usage of tools including Amazon’s AI coding assistant, Kiro, and rewarded employees with internal badges known as PhoneTool awards. According to an internal company announcement, the project was created to increase awareness of how AI could help accelerate development work.
“The goal of the personal Kiro dashboard and the PhoneTool awards has been to create awareness about what AI can do to help accelerate development work,” the announcement said. Amazon added that with widespread adoption of AI tools across the company, the project had reached its objective.
However, employees familiar with the program questioned whether that was the only reason behind its shutdown.
One employee said the leaderboard created incentives to maximize AI usage rather than use the tools efficiently. “The internal reasoning is ‘this leaderboard was to incentivize usage and adoption has reached a point where we’ve achieved our goal,’” the employee said. “But my theory is that management wants to crack down on incentivizing overconsumption.”
Another employee said they deliberately boosted their ranking after being told during a performance review that they were not using AI enough. According to the employee, workers could automate prompts and generate large amounts of AI activity unrelated to their actual job duties.
“Honestly, iterating on that and maximizing the throughput was the most fun I’ve had at work,” the employee said, adding that they did not believe they were the only person gaming the system.
Amazon disputed the idea that the leaderboard was intended to encourage AI use for its own sake.
In a statement, a company spokesperson said the ranking system, known internally as KiroRank, was created by employees as a beta project and was never a formal company-approved tool.
“The beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated,” the spokesperson said.
Amazon also said it does not require teams to use AI tools or track employee usage as a performance metric, although it does monitor token utilization to understand costs and efficiency patterns.
According to employees, the dashboard was widely accessible throughout the company. One worker said many comments posted in response to the shutdown announcement called for the leaderboard to return, suggesting that despite its flaws, some employees enjoyed the competition it created.
