Amazon shutters KiroRank AI ranking after some staff gamed it
Business
Amazon has shut down its KiroRank system, which ranked employees by how much they used AI tools.
Some staff started gaming the system, using extra AI just to climb the leaderboard.
Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell said KiroRank had "good intentions," but it ended up driving up costs and was scrapped.
Amazon adopts 'normalised deployments' metric
Amazon now uses a new metric called "normalized deployments" that focuses on whether AI is actually helping get real work done, like writing code.
This move comes as Amazon faces huge AI infrastructure bills (nearly $200 billion expected in 2026) and is making cuts elsewhere, including layoffs, to keep expenses in check.