--- title: "Disney to Employees: Have the Chatbot Write Your Goals, but Own the Thinking" description: "An internal document suggests AI prompts for annual reviews; experts see sameness on the other side" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-09-28T20:48:19Z modified: 2026-09-29T02:20:49Z url: https://rews.cc/a/disney-to-employees-have-the-chatbot-write-your-goals-but-ow-cc3fca language: en tags: ["ai", "workforce", "automation", "productivity", "management", "business"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Disney to Employees: Have the Chatbot Write Your Goals, but Own the Thinking *An internal document suggests AI prompts for annual reviews; experts see sameness on the other side* By Nate Ledger · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/disney-to-employees-have-the-chatbot-write-your-goals-but-ow-cc3fca ## In brief - Disney urged employees, via an internal document seen by Business Insider, to use AI for annual reviews and goal setting - Suggested prompts have chatbots draft “ambitious, specific, and measurable” goals and development targets - Document allows Disney-sanctioned tools like Microsoft Copilot but says workers remain responsible for their thinking - Professors warned reviews could become generic and interchangeable, making real excellence harder to spot - Disney recently hired its first chief technology officer, from Character.AI, and built an AI adoption dashboard There is a well-known problem in corporate America, which is that companies have spent enormous sums on artificial intelligence and would now like someone, anyone, to use it for something. Sarah Franklin, the CEO of HR software firm Lattice, puts it plainly to Business Insider: companies are “trying desperately to find value from the AI that they’ve paid a lot of money for.” Disney has found one: the annual performance review. Business Insider reports that the company encouraged employees, in an internal document it viewed, to use AI ahead of their yearly reviews — including asking chatbots to generate their goals for the coming year and the ways they might improve. The suggested prompts are specific enough to be fill-in-the-blank exercises: > Given my role \[insert your role/title\], help me create three ambitious, specific, and measurable goals that are in alignment with my team’s overall business objectives \[insert team FY26 objectives\]. Another asks the bot to draft a goal based on last year’s development areas; a third to “generate a goal that would help me improve how I display \[insert one of the Disney People Leadership Expectations or Disney Values\].” Employees are told they can use Disney-sanctioned tools, such as Microsoft Copilot, as “a brainstorming partner,” and that chatbots “can inspire and support” while polishing tone and wording. There is, to be fair, a line in the document acknowledging the obvious failure mode. Disney discourages workers from outsourcing their thinking entirely: “While AI acts as an accelerator for idea generation, you remain responsible and accountable for ensuring you and your leader are aligned on the right priorities.” Which is a reasonable sentiment, though it does contain the seed of the whole comedy — if you remain responsible for the thinking, the chatbot is responsible for the typing. ## Everyone sounds great Now consider the manager. Imagine — purely hypothetically — that you run a team of ten at a large entertainment company, and all ten direct reports have prepared for review season with the same three suggested prompts fed into the same sanctioned chatbot. What arrives in your inbox? “If you have an AI prompt generate goals, you’re going to have very similar goals across the team, and that’s going to be a challenge for the manager,” says Elijah Wee, a management professor at the University of Washington, speaking to Business Insider. Ten employees, ten goals that are ambitious, specific, measurable, aligned with team objectives — and eerily interchangeable. Chris Dellarocas, a Boston University business professor who has written about generative AI and performance reviews, generalized the problem: “When everyone’s review is written by AI, everyone sounds great, and it gets harder to tell real excellence from generic praise.” This is the performance-review version of grade inflation, except the printing press is a language model. The review process exists, in theory, to sort employees. A tool that makes everyone sound equally polished is a tool that un-sorts them. There is a genuine upside, and the experts concede it. Greg Summers, CEO of recruiting firm Orion Talent, told Business Insider that AI is most effective in reviews when it summarizes the past year’s achievements: “Instead of trying to remember what you did and how to frame that, it can give you more time to spend on the goals going forward.” A Disney software engineer said their manager encouraged them to use AI to “go through all our work from the past year” and finish reviews on time, calling the old way “a very manual process that can take a lot of time.” Hours saved, for both reviewer and reviewed, is not nothing in a company of Disney’s size. But note the asymmetry. Summarizing what you did is a memory-and-typing problem, and chatbots are good at it. Deciding what you should do next — and whether you actually did what you claimed — is a judgment problem, and that is precisely the part Franklin says companies must not hand over: they should ensure they’re “not outsourcing human judgment.” ## The Disney context The review push is one piece of a broader AI buildup at Disney, per Business Insider: an internal AI adoption dashboard, AI-generated ads on Disney+, and, in mid-September, the hiring of the company’s first-ever chief technology officer, poached from the AI video startup Character.AI. CEO Josh D’Amaro told employees in a recent memo that “technology in service of creativity” is one of his three priorities as CEO. Disney is not alone here — Meta and Amazon have also been folding AI into how employees are evaluated. The dress rehearsal question for all of it is awkward. If the employee uses AI to write the self-assessment, and the manager uses AI to summarize ten of them, and HR uses AI to calibrate the ratings — who, exactly, is being reviewed? The machine writes the goals, the machine reads the goals, and the human remains, as Disney’s document insists, responsible and accountable. Someone has to be. There’s no prompt for that.