To say managers and employees often approach performance reviews with mixed feelings would be doing a disservice to mixed feelings. While necessary, they're rarely enjoyable for either party.
At its core, a performance review is a structured check-in between a manager and an employee -- traditionally once or twice a year to discuss progress, goals, and growth. Done right, it motivates both management and staff. Done poorly, it fuels disengagement.
Now with AI appearing seemingly everywhere in the workplace, there's a temptation to outsource the whole thing to new technology. After all, performance reviews are tedious, and AI is supposed to be great at saving time. With AI, organizations can move beyond annual reviews and toward more frequent feedback cycles, as the technology helps streamline the twice-yearly check-ins.
In performance reviews, AI works by pulling together data from one-on-one discussions, emails, peer feedback, and project metrics -- and organizes it into a single, coherent summary. This gives the manager an overview of the employee's performance without relying on memory or scrambling for last-minute input.
Before handing your performance review preparations and evaluations over to an AI tool, it's important to consider the potential downsides. After all, AI is only as good as the information it's given. Without consistent tracking, there's little for AI to synthesize.
If handled poorly, an AI-driven review risks replacing thoughtful feedback from managers with cold data and losing the human element that can make these reviews genuinely constructive. The way AI tools are trained, too, could reinforce biases, rather than avoiding them, and this may not be immediately obvious. That could ingrain flaws, rather than fix them.
But all is not lost. There is a role for AI to play in performance reviews. To understand how to strike the right balance, we spoke with two leaders in AI-powered performance management and coaching -- Jamie Aitken of Betterworks and Mike Dolen of Humancore.ai -- who share how to use AI as a part of the review process without it backfiring on you.
One way AI is being used to save time and provide useful data is by pulling together feedback and metrics on an employee, instead of the manager gathering it manually or relying on memory.
Aitken, VP of HR Transformation at Betterworks, which makes performance review software, gave an example: If an employee works on multiple projects throughout the year with different team leads, a manager might need help storing and summarizing feedback.
"AI can look at all of that information, summarize it throughout the course of an entire year, and instead of a manager running around trying to ask people for feedback, they now have one place," to find and review it.
AI can also help counter recency bias. "For managers, recency bias is a challenge," Aitken explained.
"If I only have a conversation with you once or twice a year, I may not be thinking about the things that you did 10 months ago," she says. "With recency bias, I may only be thinking about the things that have happened in the last two months."
By summarizing feedback and tracking performance over time, AI gives managers a bigger overview, helping them reduce the impact of recency bias and providing an accurate, longer-term record to evaluate during reviews.
Beyond helping managers see the full picture, AI can also support them in the moment, guiding conversations as they happen. Aitken, reflecting on her 25 years in HR, explained that organizations often assume all managers will naturally be great coaches -- but without ongoing guidance, that rarely happens.
"You can't pull managers into a classroom once a year and say, 'Here's what it takes to be a good coach.' They need to have in the moment, coaching, tips, and guidance to help them have conversations," she says. AI can give managers just-in-time recommendations -- on goals, feedback, or career development -- helping them gradually develop the coaching skills organizations need, Aitken explains.
By way of example, she adds, "If I'm about to give feedback, I can ask my AI copilot: 'Can you give me some recommendations on how I need to rephrase this?' It will give me a recommendation, but very importantly, it will tell me why to give that recommendation."
While AI can streamline feedback, reduce bias, and provide real-time coaching, it works best when paired with thoughtful human judgment and oversight.
Although AI can be a useful tool in performance reviews, Aitken emphasizes it shouldn't replace the human element.
"Certainly, you will be putting in your comments first and having AI as a coach or co-pilot to make recommendations -- potentially to address bias in your language or constructiveness to your response," she says, "but it's still people first. AI is not a replacement."
Dolen, CEO of Humancore, which uses AI as kind of an always-on coach for managers, echoes a similar point, stressing that AI should enhance, but not replace, managers and employee interactions.
"Automation is great from an efficiency standpoint, but to the extent that it results in diminished human-to-human contact and meaningful discussion, it can be a detrimental thing," he explains.
The risk of relying too heavily on AI is that it can strip away the human connection -- the most important part of any review. Managers still need to validate evidence, layer in their own opinions, and make final judgments.
"Otherwise, it's an artificial scorecard that employees can easily discard or challenge. AI drafts and humans decide," he said.
One employee described their performance review experience on Reddit, when their manager admitted to using AI to help them conduct it:
"All of this just felt very off-putting and impersonal," they wrote. "Sure, I've used AI before to help write emails, etc... but never for something as personal as a performance review. My manager and I have a pretty ok-ish relationship and will often talk about our personal lives outside of work together, but this made me feel like I was just another disposable annoyance to my manager because he couldn't even bother to put more than 5 minutes of effort into a larger conversation about my career/development/overall happiness," he said.
Another employee shared on the same platform that their manager was using AI to conduct their performance review, without providing any personal feedback.
The user then asked the readers of Reddit, "Is this where I'm at now? Just another consultant getting a generic, AI-generated evaluation?"
Tsk, tsk.
While AI can speed up the process, it shouldn't just be a copy-and-paste solution.
If managers rely too heavily on AI, reviews risk feeling impersonal, biased, or superficial. But when combined with personal observations and concrete examples, AI becomes a tool and not a manager substitute. Used thoughtfully, AI can streamline the process while keeping feedback credible.
AI or not, some aspects of performance reviews never really change: employees need human connection and want to feel understood. AI can make these conversations easier and more frequent, but it can't replace the trust, empathy, and support that an employee can get from their manager.
No matter how sophisticated AI tools become, those principles will always guide successful reviews.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
