The Performance Review AI Everyone Expected Is Not The One People Use

Bora Unlu is the co-founder and CEO of Teamflect, a performance management & employee engagement platform designed for Microsoft 365.

When the discussion of AI in performance management first became prominent, the debate centered on judgment. Could an algorithm evaluate an employee more fairly than a manager could?

A 2025 Gartner survey of nearly 3,500 employees found that 87% thought algorithms could give fairer feedback than their managers. For anyone who manages people, that is a difficult sentence to read.

The software, however, went somewhere else. Gallup’s workforce data recently found that writing and editing are the most common uses of AI at work, at 51%. The performance review category, therefore, shipped writing help rather than judgment: Draft the review, summarize the year, turn scattered notes into competency language.

The largest employers did the same. Early adopters like Citi and JPMorgan both introduced AI to help managers write evaluations, not to grade anyone.

Building Teamflect has given me a close view of how employees, managers and HR teams use AI around performance reviews. Along the way, I’ve been surprised to find that these teams aren’t asking AI to make the judgment calls (well, occasionally they are).

Employees want help expressing what they know. Managers want a second reader. HR teams want help understanding across a cycle. In most cases, the consequential decision of judgment still belongs to a human owner. ​

Employees Use AI As A Translator

Individual contributors usually come to AI a few days before the review deadline with a particular job in mind. They ask for help with their self-review highlights.

The requests are relatively plain. Some paste in the question they are stuck on and ask what to write. Some want every answer filled in. Some employees even ask for help when rating their own performance.

This actually makes sense, considering what most review forms ask. We are all used to sections like:

• Rate your ownership of project execution.