Increasingly, we are seeing managers use AI tools to create performance reviews for their direct reports.

This will become a big trend as companies continue to reduce the size of “middle managers” and increase their span of controls to manage more people on their teams.

While I don’t think The Office‘s legendary Scranton Manager Michael Scott leveraged AI for his admin Pam Beesly‘s performance review, I’ve spoken to some people who feel their recent performance reviews were written in a very robotic and matter-of-fact type of manner – and perhaps by AI.

While there’s definitely benefits to using these AI tools as a starting point to help draft a performance review such as in the areas of data collection, completeness, saving time, and reduction of potential bias, I also think managers need to be careful and responsible when using these tools.

I think the ultimate output of any initial AI-generated performance review still needs to be carefully created in the voice of the manager and with real examples of an employees impact and opportunities for improvement.

Knowing how hard our teammates work and the important roles that managers play in the development and growth of their teammates, managers should use AI as a tool to jumpstart performance reviews.

However, in this AI era, managers shouldn’t completely abidicate their important responsibility in creating meaningful performance reviews to AI tools. If that’s the case, then perhaps we ought to have AI as our “check the box” managers instead of humans 😎.