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‘Tokenmaxxing’ your way to a zero-day work week

As firms link AI usage to performance, workers will face a peculiar, self-cannibalising logic

    • As more companies turn to chatbot-flogging as a proxy for productive AI adoption, a plethora of unintended consequences will thrive.
    • As more companies turn to chatbot-flogging as a proxy for productive AI adoption, a plethora of unintended consequences will thrive. ILLUSTRATION: FREEPIK
    Joyce Hooi
    Published Tue, Apr 14, 2026 · 06:30 AM

    IF YOU strain your ears enough, you might hear a faint, creaky squeaking on the periphery of your consciousness. That would be the sound of the hamster wheel speeding up at JPMorgan Chase. Either that, or you have tinnitus.

    Tinnitus would be only marginally more discomfiting than what awaits white-collar workers as more firms start to peg artificial intelligence usage to employee performance.

    In March, Business Insider reported that JPMorgan Chase has begun tracking its engineers through granular dashboards that categorise them as “heavy”, “light” or “non” users of AI tools such as GitHub Copilot. The engineers have ostensibly been given two core objectives – improve their coding performance and use AI to get more done.