{"id":8137,"date":"2026-07-02T15:51:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T15:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intch.org\/blog\/?p=8137"},"modified":"2026-07-02T15:51:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T15:51:05","slug":"your-teams-ai-problem-isnt-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/intch.org\/blog\/your-teams-ai-problem-isnt-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Team&#8217;s AI Problem Isn&#8217;t AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1><b>Tokenmaxxing Explains Why Your CEO Thinks AI Is Working and Your Team Doesn\u2019t<\/b><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amazon recently shut down an internal AI leaderboard, nicknamed KiroRank, after employees started feeding trivial, made-up tasks into the company\u2019s AI coding tools just to climb the rankings. As <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/91541586\/amazon-workers-pressured-to-up-ai-use-extraneous-tasks\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fast Company reported<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, one worker admitted the pressure was so intense that people were maximizing their token usage for the sake of the score, not the work. It\u2019s a small story with a big lesson: measuring AI success by tokens burned tells a company almost nothing about whether the work actually got better.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That gap between what executives track and what teams actually experience is exactly what Intch founder Yakov Filippenko wrote about in <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/e6010ebe-be98-4cd4-bbf6-741d6dbfd300\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a letter to the Financial Times<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, responding to the paper\u2019s report on young professionals souring on AI. His argument: leadership isn\u2019t measuring the wrong AI, it\u2019s measuring the wrong thing entirely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cRemote work remains the truer predictor of declining entry-level hiring, not AI,\u201d Filippenko wrote. \u201cBy outsourcing the messy curiosity of the Wikipedia rabbit hole \u2014 looking for one thing and researching three more \u2014 companies are quietly killing the critical thinking that develops through discovery, manufacturing a fragile new class of hire: fast on day one, but completely marooned by Day 30 because their brains were never permitted to train.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<h2><b>The real predictor isn\u2019t AI, it\u2019s remote work<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Filippenko\u2019s letter pushes back on the idea that AI is what\u2019s keeping junior hires out of the workforce. Companies pulled back on training junior talent well before generative AI became a boardroom talking point, largely because remote work dismantled the desk-side shadowing that used to build professional intuition. AI became a convenient explanation for a problem that started with how, and where, people work, not which tools they use.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Why tokenmaxxing backfires<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tokenmaxxing is what happens when a company rewards AI usage instead of AI outcomes. Amazon\u2019s leaderboard was meant to encourage adoption, but it ended up rewarding volume over judgment, and employees optimized for the metric instead of the mission. The company confirmed to the Financial Times that token statistics would not factor into performance reviews, but by then the damage to trust was already done. Filippenko points to the same pattern in hiring: a headline number, tracked for its own sake, quietly replaces the harder work of actually developing people.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>What should companies measure instead?<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Filippenko\u2019s proposal is to introduce large language model proficiency audits, modeled on the computer literacy courses companies rolled out in the 1990s. Instead of counting how many tokens an employee burns, audits would test whether someone can actually use AI tools to solve a real problem, delegate the routine parts, and still know when to double-check the output. It is a slower metric to build than a leaderboard, but it measures the thing that actually matters: whether people are getting better at the work, not just faster at logging activity.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>The management gap behind the AI panic<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Filippenko draws a sharp parallel: return-to-office mandates protect shareholders\u2019 commercial real estate portfolios, and the rush toward automation protects the people selling the tokens. Both let leaders sidestep a harder problem, which is that most managers still haven\u2019t learned how to delegate to a generation that won\u2019t tolerate being micromanaged. We\u2019ve written before about <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/intch.org\/blog\/gen-z-hiring-feels-like-managing-chaos\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">what it actually takes to manage Gen Z at work<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and the same lesson applies here: the tools change every year, but the management gap doesn\u2019t close on its own.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Whether a business is tracking token counts or headcount, the underlying question is the same: are you building people who can think, or hires who can only follow prompts? For companies building lean teams through part-time and fractional hiring, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/intch.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Intch<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> connects businesses with experienced professionals who don\u2019t need a leaderboard to prove they know how to do the work.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tokenmaxxing Explains Why Your CEO Thinks AI Is Working and Your Team Doesn\u2019t Amazon recently shut down an internal AI leaderboard, nicknamed KiroRank, after employees started feeding trivial, made-up tasks into the company\u2019s AI coding tools just to climb the rankings. As Fast Company reported, one worker admitted the pressure was so intense that people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":8138,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,20,198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-expertise-business","category-featured-blog","category-intch-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Your Team&#039;s AI Problem Isn&#039;t AI - Intch Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/intch.org\/blog\/your-teams-ai-problem-isnt-ai\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Your Team&#039;s AI Problem Isn&#039;t AI - Intch Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tokenmaxxing Explains Why Your CEO Thinks AI Is Working and Your Team Doesn\u2019t Amazon recently shut down an internal AI leaderboard, nicknamed KiroRank, after employees started feeding trivial, made-up tasks into the company\u2019s AI coding tools just to climb the rankings. As Fast Company reported, one worker admitted the pressure was so intense that people [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/intch.org\/blog\/your-teams-ai-problem-isnt-ai\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Intch Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-02T15:51:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/intch.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/pics-1-1024x576.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"576\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andriana\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Andriana\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Your Team's AI Problem Isn't AI - Intch Blog","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/intch.org\/blog\/your-teams-ai-problem-isnt-ai\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Your Team's AI Problem Isn't AI - Intch Blog","og_description":"Tokenmaxxing Explains Why Your CEO Thinks AI Is Working and Your Team Doesn\u2019t Amazon recently shut down an internal AI leaderboard, nicknamed KiroRank, after employees started feeding trivial, made-up tasks into the company\u2019s AI coding tools just to climb the rankings. 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