AI has the potential to reshape performance management, but only if it makes the experience simpler for employees and managers. That was the clear message from Bruce Walcroft, Director of Solutions Engineering at Betterworks, in conversation with UC Today at HR Tech Europe 2026.
UC Today’s time at HR Tech Europe showed that AI was one of the dominant themes across HR conversations, with vendors and buyers focused on how to bring it into everyday workflows. But interviews like this make one point especially clear: AI alone is not enough. The real test is implementation and whether these tools remove friction or simply move complexity elsewhere.
In performance management, that distinction matters. If AI adds another layer of process, another prompt, or another system to learn, it risks becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.
The Problem with AI-Enabled Performance Management
Walcroft’s central argument is that many organizations still expect AI to fit neatly into the way they already work. That, he suggested, is a mistake:
“The enterprise vendors generally underestimate the amount of thought that they have to put into what they’re trying to achieve.”
That goes to the heart of why so many transformation projects stall. Companies often take old processes and place them inside new software, expecting better results. But as Walcroft noted, “you’re not going to get any different outcome” if the process itself is unchanged.
That is especially true in performance management, where the gap between strategy, goals, feedback, and reviews is often wide. Employees are expected to define goals, managers are expected to review performance, and HR teams are expected to keep the whole system aligned. If AI is layered onto that structure without rethinking the workflow, it can make the experience harder to navigate.
Walcroft’s comments also point to a wider market issue: a lot of AI innovation is largely interface decoration. The product may look smarter, but if employees still need to understand complicated workflows or figure out how to use the tool, adoption will lag.
Why Complexity Kills Adoption
Part of the challenge is that employees are often asked to use AI tools without being shown how to use them properly. Walcroft said, “You’ve got to write a prompt,” but for many people, that is not intuitive. That is a serious issue in performance management, where users are often not power users and may not be confident with the underlying process to begin with.
His point was that AI should reduce the burden on users, not shift it onto them. The best systems, in his view, work almost invisibly in the background. “AI is a great label for impressing people,” he said, but the better approach is to make it feel simple, with “a button they press that does the work behind the scenes.”
That is an important distinction for HR technology buyers. Employees are unlikely to embrace AI because it is novel. They will embrace it if it helps them complete tasks faster, with less effort and more confidence.
