Kamal Ghorui
Google has spent the past year telling employees to get comfortable with AI. What started as encouragement from the CEO is now being baked into how workers are evaluated—and it’s no longer just about engineers. In recent weeks, managers at Google have begun informing non-technical employees that their use of AI tools will be considered during performance reviews later this year, Business Insider reported. Some sales staff have even been handed weekly quotas for how often they’re expected to use specific AI tools. The shift signals that AI adoption at Google is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s becoming a job requirement.
AI use is now part of the job description at Google
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Last July, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees at an all-hands meeting that Google needed to “drive higher productivity” and that rivals would be leveraging AI internally. The message was clear—get on board or fall behind.
Since then, the company has steadily turned up the pressure. In June last year, engineering VP Megan Kacholia emailed software engineers asking them to use AI coding tools and informed them that their job descriptions were being updated to reflect this. Now, that same expectation is trickling down to non-technical staff.In certain teams, more senior employees are expected to show a stronger understanding of AI than their junior colleagues, according to the report.
Not just engineers anymore—sales, strategy, and more staff are on the clock
Google has built an ecosystem of internal AI tools for this push. There’s Duckie, a special version of Gemini trained on internal documentation. Engineers use Goose, a coding assistant trained on Google’s technical history. Sales teams have access to Yoodli, an AI avatar they can practise customer conversations with before making actual calls.The company’s CFO Anat Ashkenazi said during the Q4 2025 earnings call that around 50% of code at Google is now written by AI agents and reviewed by human engineers. That’s up from the 30% figure Pichai cited in April last year.
Google joins Meta and Microsoft in tying AI use to employee evaluations
Google isn’t alone in this. Meta has told employees their 2026 reviews will assess “AI-driven impact.” Microsoft’s leadership has said using AI is “no longer optional.” Shopify’s CEO went a step further, telling teams to prove they can’t solve a problem with AI before asking for more headcount.A Google spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that managers across both technical and non-technical roles now have the discretion to evaluate employees based on their AI use. For Googlers, the message is hard to miss.
