Amazon’s abandoned AI leaderboard is not really a story about artificial intelligence. It is a story about incentives.

Employees responded exactly as rational humans do when a metric becomes a target: they optimized for the metric.

From school social-service certificates to ISO audits, from engagement algorithms to AI adoption dashboards, organizations keep repeating the same mistake. The ritual changes. The paperwork changes. The dashboards become more sophisticated. The underlying behaviour does not.

The question is no longer whether we are using AI.

The question is whether AI is helping us create value, or merely helping us perform compliance more efficiently. 😈