Amazon VP says his division is hiring and promoting based on employees' AI usage (www.businessinsider.com)

Amazon VP of product Jamie Siminoff told Business Insider he’s making AI usage an explicit criterion for hiring and promotions in Amazon’s home‑security RBKS division (Ring, Blink, Key, Sidewalk). Internal communications require promotion applicants to list how they use AI, and interviews now probe whether candidates “lean into AI first” — with concrete expectations like familiarity with tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini and role‑specific questions (e.g., which engineering tools you use). Siminoff says the goal is to reward employees who create disproportionate “leverage for the company” by integrating AI into daily workflows and product features; he has also steered Ring toward more AI-powered crime‑fighting capabilities since returning as VP. For the AI/ML community this signals a shift from exploratory experimentation to operational fluency as a workplace competency: familiarity with LLMs, prompt engineering, model/tool integration and MLOps may now be treated as measurable performance factors. That could accelerate tool adoption and demand for practical AI skills, but raises questions about fair evaluation, security, dependency on third‑party models, and how “AI contribution” is quantified. Amazon says the policy applies to RBKS, not the whole company, but the move illustrates how corporate incentives can rapidly reshape hiring, upskilling and product priorities around generative AI.