AI Alone Won't Save Performance Reviews, But It Can Make Managers See More Clearly

We're excited to share that Confirm was recently featured in TechHR Series with a guest post titled "AI Alone Won't Save Performance Reviews, But It Can Make Managers See More Clearly."

Performance reviews are broken. Not just flawed or outdated — but fundamentally broken in ways that AI alone cannot repair. That's the core argument David Murray, CEO of Confirm, makes in this piece published on TechHR Series in July 2025.

The article tackles a misconception that's become dangerously common in HR technology circles: that artificial intelligence is the silver bullet for performance management. Vendors are rushing to add "AI-powered" to their marketing, and HR leaders are being told that the right software will solve their review problems.

But as the piece argues, the problems with performance reviews aren't primarily computational. They're structural and human. Recency bias, manager blind spots, the politics of calibration, the tendency to rate on likeability rather than impact — these are problems rooted in how organizations gather and process information about people.

What AI can do — and this is where Confirm's approach comes in — is give managers dramatically better visibility. By analyzing collaboration patterns through organizational network analysis (ONA), AI can surface who employees are actually working with, who relies on them, who they mentor informally, and what their true impact footprint looks like. This is the kind of signal that human managers, no matter how talented, simply cannot gather manually at scale.

The article draws a clear line: AI as a lens for better human judgment, not a replacement for it. Managers who can see the full picture of an employee's contribution — not just what's directly visible in their reporting relationship — make better decisions. They catch hidden high performers. They notice who's burning out. They make calibration decisions grounded in evidence rather than gut feel.

For HR leaders navigating the growing landscape of "AI-powered" performance management tools, this piece offers a useful framework for evaluating what AI actually helps with versus what remains a fundamentally human responsibility.

Read the full article: AI Alone Won't Save Performance Reviews, But It Can Make Managers See More Clearly — TechHR Series