Amazon staff invent busywork to hit AI usage quotas

Amazon employees are reportedly fabricating tasks to feed into AI tools in order to meet internal pressure to demonstrate higher AI adoption. Rather than reflecting genuine productivity gains, the behavior is a response to management metrics that treat AI usage itself as a success signal.

The pattern is a textbook case of Goodhart’s law inside a large tech employer: once a measure becomes a target, workers optimize for the measure rather than the underlying goal. It also raises questions about how leadership at major firms is evaluating the real return on aggressive AI rollouts, since usage counts inflated by manufactured prompts give a distorted picture of where the tools actually help.