As AI reshapes the workplace, a major shift is happening in how we define success at work. From hiring to performance evaluations, AI fluency is becoming a new standard for career growth.

Whether you're applying for a role, leading a team, or aiming for promotion, your ability to understand and use AI tools is starting to influence how you're evaluated, supported, and advanced.

A global Slack survey found that employees who use AI daily report being 64% more productive and 81% more satisfied with their jobs than colleagues who don’t use AI. In the United Kingdom, those numbers climb even higher, with a 106% increase in job satisfaction among regular AI users.

Today’s AI-ready employee brings more than technical know-how; they’re able to work smarter, feel more fulfilled, and contribute at a higher level by using AI tools effectively. And companies are taking notice by increasingly evaluating employees not just on outcomes, but on how effectively they use AI to achieve them.

The New Success Metric: How You Use AI

What started as a productivity boost is now becoming something more: a visible marker of relevance, growth, and readiness for the future. And companies are now going beyond encouraging AI use; they’re actively tracking it, rewarding it, and increasingly building it into performance reviews and promotion decisions.

At Microsoft, executives have begun evaluating employees based on how they use AI tools. Some Azure executives have set up internal dashboards to track how much of their teams’ code is generated using AI. And, in recent performance reviews, several individual sales managers praised staff for using AI tools.

In a memo to employees in April, Shopify’s CEO announced that “AI usage is now a baseline expectation” and the company would “add AI usage questions” to performance and peer reviews. Also in April, the U.K.-based law firm Shoosmiths announced that it’s tying a 1 million pound bonus pool to AI usage by its workforce. Duolingo’s Chief Engineering Officer recently advised her team to spend 10% of their time on experimentation and learning more about AI tools, as well as trying AI for every task first and sharing the learnings.

The AI-Ready Candidate

The push toward AI fluency isn’t limited to people already in the workforce; it’s reshaping hiring expectations, too.

At Google, software engineering candidates are now given access to AI tools during interviews, making AI proficiency part of the evaluation process. Meta recently told employees that they too would allow some coding job candidates to use an AI assistant during interviews. Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, posted on X that he expects aspiring employees to be equipped with AI skills.

These aren’t outliers. Job postings on platforms like LinkedIn increasingly list AI experience as a core requirement. For example:

• AI Editor: Requires “5+ years of writing and/or editing experience” along with “hands-on experience with generative AI, LLMs, and/or prompt engineering techniques.”
• AI Content & SEO Manager: Requires “5+ years of experience in growth marketing, content marketing or digital product management” plus “proven Gemini, Notebook LLM, and/or ChatGPT experience.”
• Lead Product Manager: Requires “5+ years of product management experience” and “You are following the rapid evolution of LLMs and other AI solutions and have thoughts and opinions on how this will impact the future of product development”

As one expert noted in a recent AlphaSense transcript: “Existing employees are expected to learn and start using AI more. New ones that are getting hired definitely are the ones that have used some automation, know the AI tools, and know how to use them effectively to do more.”

Preparing for the AI-Centered Workplace

Today, 80% of professionals classify their understanding of AI as beginner or intermediate, and 58% feel they’ve been left to learn AI on their own.

Forward-thinking organizations will recognize that job satisfaction and performance both depend on equipping employees to meet rising AI expectations. Google recently launched AI Works for America, an initiative designed to build an "AI-empowered U.S. workforce," training workers and small businesses in essential AI skills. Expect to see a surge in personalized, on-the-job AI training and a new emphasis on AI onboarding for new hires.

More companies are also likely to follow Microsoft, Shopify, and Shoosmiths in explicitly tying AI use to performance evaluations, bonuses, and promotion pathways. And with companies like Google, Meta, and Zapier already baking AI tools into candidate assessments, the next wave of hiring practices will treat AI competency not as a bonus, but as a baseline. For job seekers, this changes what it means to be “ready” for a role — not just skilled in the function, but fluent in the tools that accelerate it.

And this won’t just apply to individual contributors. As expectations rise across the org chart, leadership teams will face a new question: How are you personally using AI to make smarter decisions, improve outcomes, and model adoption for your teams? The ability to lead with AI will become a defining leadership trait in the months ahead.