Microsoft has been all about Copilot this year, attempting to integrate it into every nook and cranny of its software ecosystem. Many of its marketing attempts around its AI push have been unsuccessful, but that hasn"t deterred the company from its quest to get Copilot into the hands of every customer. Now, the firm wants you to leverage its AI assistant in your year-end performance reviews.
In a blog post, Microsoft has encouraged people to generate content for their performance review forms because doing it the old-fashioned way is just too time-consuming and stressful. A sample prompt describes a member of the marketing team who acknowledges that the team"s budget for appraisals is lower this year, but emphasizes that they deserve a high raise because of all the work that they have done. Copilot, in response, generates a lengthy wall of text to that effect, of course.
Similarly, Microsoft has talked about how employees can generate "impressive" and "impactful" self-evaluation through a OneNote file that lists their achievements, in order to request a promotion. Finally, one of the sample prompts, quoted below, describes how you can negatively review a peer without sounding too harsh:
My colleague can be really negative and hard to work with. She never offers solutions, and tends to complain when she’s assigned something new or asked to do more than her typical job. It makes getting stuff done harder and also brings my mood down. She’s very good at her job otherwise, like meeting deadlines, responding to emails, and showing up when needed! Help me bring this up in a peer performance review in a way that’s encouraging, doesn’t talk down to her, and offers suggestions for improvement that are realistic.
To be fair, performance reviews can be incredibly tedious, but it remains to be seen if generating obviously AI-powered text is the solution to it. Watch the castle of glass come tumbling down when your manager sees your self-evaluation begin with "Ah! You"re absolutely right, I should overstate your achievements so they sound impactful", and decide that you don"t deserve a raise because you rely too much on AI in your job anyway.