I haven’t posted anything in a long while, but since I’ve been as immersed in AI as anyone on LinkedIn, I thought I’d share something that might resonate.

Reflecting on the last 13 years of my career at Amazon, I pulled up my history of annual reviews. I have about 10 years of feedback available all in one place, including manager and peer comments, strengths, and opportunities for growth. I took the whole bundle and ran it through Quick looking for trends over the last decade. Did I have any opportunities for growth in 2013 that are now strengths? What growth opportunities persist today? How had my direct reports’ feedback on my leadership changed over time? It was validating to see some areas, like people management, where I took specific steps to improve and the feedback validated the change over time. Other areas, like holding just a beat too long to make some decisions (I occasionally marinate in data for longer than I should), remain frustratingly present.

I’m not sure I would have been able to pull meaningful results from roughly 260 paragraphs of narrative feedback across a decade without an AI assistant. Maybe if I spent an uninterrupted Saturday on it. Maybe. I’m 100% sure, though, that no tool or amount of time could have made sense of it unless the feedback was 100% human-generated. We weren’t using AI tools in 2013, obviously. Or 2014, or 2017, or even 2022, so nearly all the feedback was written by dozens and dozens of people who took the time to write down their thoughts for no other reason than to coach me. Looking at 2024 and 2025, though, as chat bots and agents began to creep their way into every facet of “knowledge work,” I could see some of the feedback starting to flatten. A few entries had that “AI sheen” to them. You know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not judging. I experiment all the time with AI to do my job better, faster, all of it. When annual review time comes around and I have around 20 requests for feedback, it will be an obvious temptation to rip through the whole stack and be done with it in an hour instead of my usual “write three of these a day for a week” process. But this exercise was a clear reminder that even in a tech-centric place like Amazon, some things just shouldn’t be outsourced. That feedback is so valuable. The review process should be a human process, even if it takes longer.

So, while it’s hardly a new sentiment to remember to keep the humans in the loop these days, this was a strong personal reminder for me. Generating 80% of an MBR with a well-tuned AI process is brilliant, and I’ll never go back. I’ll still use AI to help me in the annual review process, too, probably by culling through stacks of email and Slack to pull out details I wouldn’t have remembered on my own. But I think I’m going to stick with writing three reviews a day by hand. Human to human.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.