The calibration meeting is forty minutes in, and you have reached the name that was always going to be awkward. Their numbers are up by a margin that would have been remarkable a year ago. Someone across the table says, lightly, "Well, that's mostly AI." Someone else says the same thing about a different person, except this time it is a compliment, and the room is suddenly arguing about two people who may have done almost identical things.
Nobody is being unfair on purpose. The room simply has no shared way to talk about this yet, so everyone reaches for the nearest instinct. Half of them want to discount the work because a tool helped. The other half want to reward the numbers because a number is a number. I am wary of both instincts, because each one scores the tool and neither scores the person.
Here is where I land on it. You do not need a new policy to survive this meeting. You need to move the conversation from the tool to the person, and to do it with sentences that sound like ordinary good judgment rather than a position on AI. Below are the lines I'd say, and a page you can paste into your prep so the argument has something to point at.
