It's shaping up to be the 'prove it' year for workers in Silicon Valley

• Big Tech firms like Amazon and Meta are doubling down on worker oversight and performance tracking.
• Across tech, AI investments are likely adding pressure to boost accountability, observers told BI.
• At many firms, "There is greater pressure, greater anxiety," a tech CEO said.

In Silicon Valley, 2026 is shaping up to be a show-your-work year.

Across Big Tech, companies are tightening worker oversight amid layoffs, AI-driven job anxiety, and cuts to entry-level roles. If 2025 was about bosses calling on workers to be hardcore, 2026 is about making sure they actually do it.

A look inside two of the biggest players reveals what heightened accountability can look like: Business Insider exclusively reported this month that Amazon stepped up efforts to let managers track employee badge swipes and revised performance reviews to focus more on individual accomplishments.

Meanwhile, Business Insider also learned that Meta is using dashboards to track workers' AI usage and simplifying its review structure with a winner-take-more approach that better rewards the highest performers. It is also cutting about 10% of workers at its metaverse division.

Taken together, the moves signal that Big Tech is ratcheting up the stakes for workers who find themselves in a market that's sluggish for seemingly all but AI's shiniest superstars.

The ante-upping comes as companies are pumping massive sums into AI — and, in many cases, are still waiting for the returns to materialize. A desire to see more performance metrics may stem from a need to quantify how workers are using AI to boost productivity.

"I suspect in a lot of tech firms, there is kind of a mood of panic," Matthew Bidwell, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told Business Insider, referring to executives' fear of falling behind in the AI race.

Bidwell added that the sense of urgency coming from the top around AI then leads to the question, "How do we make sure we're squeezing the most out of people?"

Big Tech's answer? Go big on metrics.

Dashboards for AI and workers

It's not just Amazon and Meta. Microsoft has worked to shed its "country club" reputation, while Google has also changed how it rates employees to incentivize outsize performance.

Productivity dashboards, tool-usage metrics, and increasingly granular performance evaluations are becoming central to how managers gauge value. The goal, executives say, is to ensure accountability and reward top performers. The shift is also philosophical: Productivity isn't assumed. It has to be proven.

At Amazon, managers have a dashboard to track how much time workers are spending at its corporate outposts — and to flag those who are brushing off the company's return-to-office mandate. The company, as part of its performance review process, is asking its corporate workers to provide three to five accomplishments that exemplify their work.

Meta is also adjusting how it keeps score of workers' performance — in part by giving more frequent feedback and tightening the focus on "rewarding outstanding performance," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider earlier this month.

The demand for greater productivity isn't limited to tech. Citi CEO Jane Fraser sent a memo to the bank's staff on Wednesday, entitled "The bar is raised," in which she made it clear to Citi's more than 200,000 workers that she expects them to raise their standards in 2026.

"We are not graded on effort. We are judged on our results," Fraser wrote in the memo.

Big Tech's big year

The power moves from Big Tech likely reflect a mix of factors, industry observers said. There is the expectation that AI will supercharge workers; yet, there is also a view that something has to justify the massive outlays on the technology.

Spending on AI tools that help programmers write code, for example, can bring with it the expectation from management that workers become faster and more efficient.

At Incedo, an enterprise AI and data firm, coding assistants have helped boost workers' productivity between 25% and 40%, Nitin Seth, the company's cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.

"As that is happening, there is a squeeze on jobs," he said. Across tech, Seth said, that can mean an imperative to produce more or cut jobs — or both. Incedo has reduced workers because of AI's productivity windfall, he said, though the company continues to hire data engineers among other roles. The company didn't specify how many roles it has cut.

Even so, Seth said, AI's productivity bounce in the tech industry hasn't been as great so far as some bosses and boards would like.

He said that by the final months of 2025, many business leaders experienced the "sobering realization" that while the early gains from AI were impressive, carving out further wins had proven difficult.

Seth likens the AI environment to that of roads and cars — where AI infrastructure is the road and an AI use case is the car. Companies have been spending big on the roads, Seth said, but as yet, "there aren't too many cars."

There's also a sunnier take: Leaders feel compelled to "better justify" the people they employ in order to protect their jobs, said Christopher Myers, the faculty director of the Center for Innovative Leadership at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

The idea, he told Business Insider, is that dashboards make it clear what workers are doing. It's a way of competing with the readily available metrics on what AI is churning through.

One clear fallout is that employers will be able to save money by pushing out low performers, Myers said. RTO mandates, he said, can also be a way of letting go of workers unwilling to comply.

Whatever's behind it, he said, leaders' thinking appears to be, "I'm really going to grade hard."

The Elon effect

It's likely that investors are worried about the number of workers at some companies, said Wharton's Bidwell. Since Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter — and the company's ability to carry on even after deep staff cuts — some investors have concluded that tech firms' pandemic-era bloat could be eliminated, Bidwell said.

"He came in. He fired everybody. It didn't fall over," he said of Musk. That has led to what Bidwell sees as "a big cultural shift" in tech about the need to hire the best and the brightest — if only to keep them from going to competitors.

The shift means that leaders in Silicon Valley are asking tougher questions about who is pulling their weight. That pressure, Incedo's Seth said, then falls on managers and, ultimately, down to rank-and-file tech workers who are seeing increased performance expectations.

"There is greater pressure, greater anxiety, and it's kind of like a snowball effect," he said.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.