The gamification of AI adoption is here.
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KPMG told Business Insider it has introduced a dashboard for its US advisory division — where KPMG recently laid off 400 employees — that lets employees track how often they use AI. It shows their use compared to their target goal and to their peer group.
The firm said it hopes the dashboard, which came online late last year, encourages more “frequent and sophisticated” AI use among the division’s 10,000 workers.
“Our data shows regular AI users produce higher-quality work, feel less stressed, and spend more time on strategic work,” Russ Grote, a spokesperson for the firm, told Business Insider. “These benefits help people progress faster in their careers. They can also better serve our clients who are going through their own transformation programs.”
KPMG says more than 90% of its US employees use AI weekly.
Business Insider reviewed screenshots of KPMG’s dashboard and spoke about it with two employees, who asked that their names not be used because they did not have permission to speak to the media.
These employees said that while the dashboard is designed to incentivize AI adoption, it’s easy to manipulate and may not accurately reflect the true extent of AI use in their day-to-day work.
AI dashboards for everyone
Since the start of the AI frenzy, consulting firms have raced to track the rate of AI adoption — and the potential returns. Some have relied on daily usage metrics while others have pored over spreadsheets to calculate the potential boost in profits.
Consulting isn’t the only place this is happening. As companies face increasing pressure to show returns on AI, these kinds of dashboards are popping up everywhere.
JPMorgan, for example, recently told developers in its 65,000-person tech division to use AI to improve the code they produce — and is tracking that progress with internal dashboards. Those tools rank engineers based on how often they use tools like GitHub Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude.
Disney has dashboards that track how many employees are using AI, how often, and how many tokens they’ve generated over a given period. At Amazon, teams monitor how many engineers use AI each month, how often those tools are embedded in day-to-day workflows, and whether that usage is actually producing meaningful results.
Gaming the game
In October, KPMG CEO Tim Walsh told Business Insider the firm was urging all employees to use AI because “it’s critical to your success in the future.”
KPMG uses several internal AI tools, such as aIQ Chat, which gives employees secure access to large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. There is also its Digital Gateway, an AI-powered platform the firm says helps it plan for changing tax regulations.
The dashboard tracks some of these tools, as well as external tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot. Many employees are expected to hit a 75% usage target — meaning they’ve used AI on three-quarters of the business days.
One employee who spoke to Business Insider said the dashboard can’t track popular vibe-coding tools like Lovable or Claude Code, which software engineers often use.
They said the usage metric is easy to game. “You can just run a prompt — that would be your AI usage for the day,” one employee said, adding that they can automate systems to run prompts on the weekends to keep the usage metrics high.
Grote said KPMG’s dashboard is one part of a larger effort to encourage more sophisticated use of AI, which includes learning programs and other incentives.
“We are well past simple adoption,” he said. We are “focusing on encouraging people to use our many powerful AI platforms and tools in more frequent and sophisticated ways.”
KPMG says it does this with a carrot rather than a stick. Grote pointed to the “AI Spark Innovation Awards,” which the firm launched earlier this year, also in its advisory division. The awards offer cash prizes to consultants who demonstrate creative ways they’ve used AI to solve problems.
The firm also worked with the University of Texas at Austin to study how employees can achieve more “sophisticated” outcomes with AI.
“Our research with UT-Austin shows that the people who get the most value out of AI did not have the most technical knowledge or simply used AI for basic tasks,” Grote said. “Instead, they treated AI like a true partner, iterating and guiding AI through more complex work or thinking.” He said the firm shared this research with its employees.
Do you work in consulting and have a story to share? Email Lakshmi Varanasi at lvaranasi@businessinsider.com from a non-work email and device or contact her on Signal at lvaranasi.70.
