A machine now drafts your review, but nobody rewrote what "good" means. Citi, JPMorgan, and BCG use AI to write year-end evaluations, yet 90 percent of HR leaders say AI already changed what a high performer looks like while only 42 percent of companies updated their criteria (Betterworks, a performance-software vendor, surveyed 2,387).
The catch: AI scores your traces, not you, and it cannot credit the quiet save it never saw.
Three moves before review season:
- Keep a running record of three or four consequential episodes, with the decision, the stakes, and the outcome.
- Put them where your manager and the tool both look, in the shared doc, not a private file.
- Ask plainly what data feeds your evaluation. A vague answer is the answer.
Make the work that mattered legible to a machine, because right now that job is yours.
