Gamification of AI deployment is here.
KPMG told Business Insider that it has introduced a dashboard in its U.S. advisory division (KPMG recently laid off 400 employees) to help employees track how often they use AI. This shows its usage compared to target goals and peer groups.
The company said it hopes the dashboard, which went online late last year, will encourage the division’s 10,000 employees to use AI more “frequently and sophisticatedly.”
“Data shows that regular AI users produce higher quality work, experience less stress, and spend more time on strategic tasks,” company spokesperson Russ Groat told Business Insider. “These benefits can help people advance their careers faster, and also allow us to better serve clients who are implementing their own transformation programs.”
According to KPMG, more than 90% of U.S. employees use AI on a weekly basis.
Business Insider saw screenshots of KPMG’s dashboards and spoke to two employees about the matter. The employee asked that his name not be used because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
These employees said that while the dashboards were designed to encourage AI adoption, they were easy to navigate and may not accurately reflect the true extent of AI use in daily work.
AI dashboard for everyone
Since the AI craze began, consulting firms have raced to track AI adoption rates and potential benefits. Some companies rely on daily usage metrics, while others pore over spreadsheets to calculate profit growth potential.
Consulting isn’t the only industry where this is happening. These types of dashboards are popping up everywhere as companies face increasing pressure to demonstrate the benefits of AI.
For example, JPMorgan recently directed its 65,000 technology developers to improve the code they generate using AI, and tracked their progress on internal dashboards. These tools rank engineers based on how often they use tools like GitHub Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude.
Disney has a dashboard that tracks how many employees are using AI, how often, and how many tokens are generated over a period of time. At Amazon, teams monitor how many engineers are using AI each month, how often those tools are incorporated into their daily workflows, and whether their usage is actually producing meaningful results.
play the game
In October, KPMG CEO Tim Walsh told Business Insider that the company is encouraging all employees to use AI because “AI is essential to our future success.”
KPMG has several In-house AI tools, aIQ Chat and others give employees secure access to large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. There’s also Digital Gateway, an AI-powered platform that the company says will help plan for tax law changes.
The dashboard tracks some of these tools as well as external tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot. Many employees are expected to achieve a 75% utilization goal, which means they’re using AI for three-quarters of their workday.
One employee who spoke to Business Insider said the dashboard doesn’t track popular Vibe coding tools like Lovable and Claude Code, which are often used by software engineers.
They said usage metrics are easy to manipulate. “You just run a prompt and it’s AI usage for the day,” one employee said, adding that the system can also be automated to run prompts on weekends to keep usage metrics high.
Groat said KPMG’s dashboard is part of a larger effort to encourage more advanced use of AI, including learning programs and other incentives.
“We go far beyond simple adoption,” he said. We are “focused on encouraging people to use our many powerful AI platforms and tools more frequently and in sophisticated ways.”
KPMG says it will do this with carrots, not sticks. Grote pointed to the AI Spark Innovation Awards, which the company launched earlier this year, also in the advisory category. The award rewards consultants who demonstrate creative ways to use AI to solve problems.
The company also worked with the University of Texas at Austin to study how employees can use AI to achieve more “sophisticated” outcomes.
“In our research with the University of Texas at Austin, we found that people who are getting the most value from AI either don’t have advanced technical knowledge or are just using AI for basic tasks,” Grote said. “Instead, they treated the AI like a true partner, iterating and coaching it through more complex tasks and thinking.” He said the company shared the findings with employees.
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