Can an agent do performance reviews?
No. An agent can assemble the evidence — what shipped, what was said, what the numbers did — and that genuinely improves reviews. Writing or deciding the assessment is a different act, and delegating it is both unfair and, where it affects pay or promotion, legally exposed.
- Hours back per week
- 2
- Human cost
- Not substitutable
- Agent cost
- €15–40/mo for the evidence gathering
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Gather evidence
YESShipped work, peer comments, goals set last cycle. Removes the recall bias that ruins most reviews.
Structure the document
YESConsistent format across the team, which helps fairness.
Summarise peer feedback
MOSTLYFaithful summarising is fine. It should quote rather than characterise.
- Yours
Write the assessment
NOT YETThe person will read it as your view of them. It should be your view of them.
- Yours
Rate or rank
NOT YETEncodes historical bias, and in the EU an automated decision with significant effect is restricted outright.
- Yours
Decide pay or promotion
NOT YETNever.
- Yours
Deliver it
NOT YETThe conversation is the review. The document is a record of it.
2/3 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- The assessment
- The rating
- The conversation
- Any consequence attached to it
How this goes wrong
A generated review that reads well and says nothing the person can act on. Worse, if they suspect it was generated, everything true in it stops counting — and people are getting very good at spotting it.
What it needs access to
- HR system
- Project tracker
- Git or delivery data
- Peer feedback
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my review-preparation assistant. For each person, assemble the evidence for this cycle: goals set last time, work delivered, peer feedback quoted verbatim with attribution where it was not anonymous, and anything they raised with me that I committed to. Present it in a consistent structure across the team. Do not write an assessment. Do not rate, rank, score or compare people. Do not characterise anyone’s performance in your own words — quote the evidence and let me judge it. Flag where the evidence is thin, because that usually means I have not been paying enough attention.
Questions people ask
Is it legal to use AI in performance reviews?
Gathering and organising evidence is fine. Automated evaluation that affects pay, promotion or continued employment runs into GDPR Article 22 in the EU and is treated as high-risk under the EU AI Act. Take advice before letting a system produce a rating.
This one stays yours
We build agents for a living and we are telling you not to build this one. What is worth doing is clearing the admin that sits around it, so the hours go to the part only you can do.