Turning on AI-Assisted Reviews at the company level does not determine what happens in every review cycle. When you configure a review cycle, you choose the review experience for that cycle and, when AI is enabled, which capabilities the cycle uses.
Lifecycle Reviews are not included in AI-Assisted Reviews and are unaffected by these settings.
Before you begin
- You need permission to manage the review cycle. This includes review admins and collaborators where applicable.
- AI-Assisted Reviews must be enabled for your account. See Set up AI-Assisted Reviews.
- These settings apply to manual review cycles.
Choose the review experience for a cycle
Every manual review cycle uses one of three experiences. You choose during cycle setup, and you can change the setting in 15Five AI > Review experience in this cycle.
| Experience | What it means |
|---|---|
| Enable 15Five AI | Uses the new Reviews experience with AI capabilities available. You can choose whether to use AI drafting and/or conversation guides, set the drafting audience, and define the performance period. |
| Disable 15Five AI | Uses the new Reviews experience without AI-Assisted Reviews functionality. There are no Moments, AI drafts, review assistant, or conversation guides. |
| Use the legacy experience | Keeps the cycle on the previous review experience, including its previous AI functionality and previous interface. This is available as a temporary transition option while you move to the new experience. |
Disable 15Five AI is not the legacy experience. It keeps the cycle on the new review experience and removes the AI-Assisted Reviews functionality, so writers get the new experience without AI in it. Use the legacy experience is different: it returns the cycle to the previous review experience, which has its own earlier AI functionality. If you do not want AI-Assisted Reviews in a cycle, Disable 15Five AI is the option that removes it.
Enable 15Five AI is selected by default for new cycles created on or after September 17. Cycles that were already draft, upcoming, or active before September 17 stay on the legacy experience by default. The experience is not changed underneath a cycle you have already prepared. You can intentionally change the experience in cycle settings if you want to move an existing cycle to AI-Assisted Reviews.
Configure AI drafting and conversation guides
Within Enable 15Five AI, AI drafting and conversation guides are configured separately. You do not have to introduce every part of AI-Assisted Reviews at once. For example, you can use conversation guides without giving review writers AI-generated drafts, or the reverse.
- AI drafting generates initial answers for eligible open-text questions and gives writers Moments and the review assistant while they write.
- Conversation guides help the manager prepare for the review conversation after the participant's self review and manager review have both been submitted.
Set the drafting audience
If drafting is enabled, you can also choose who gets it:
- Everyone
- Everyone except selected people or groups
- Only selected people or groups
You can narrow the audience using the targeting available in the setup flow, including departments, teams, hierarchies, and individual people. This gives you a practical way to pilot AI-Assisted Reviews with a smaller group of managers or a single department and expand after the first cycle.
The writer count shown during setup can change as you continue configuring participants, because participant settings affect who will actually write reviews.
Writer-level targeting is only available when the cycle uses Enable 15Five AI. If you choose Disable 15Five AI or the legacy experience, that choice applies across the cycle.
Set the performance period
The performance period tells AI-Assisted Reviews what period of work the review is meant to evaluate. It is separate from the dates when the review cycle itself opens and closes. For example, a cycle might open in December while the performance period runs June 1 through November 30. In that case, AI-Assisted Reviews looks within the June through November window when generating Moments for that cycle.
- In the cycle setup flow, locate the Performance period section.
- Set the start date and end date for the period of work this cycle evaluates.
The performance period sets the boundary for what can become a Moment. It does not mean that everything that happened during that period becomes one. A Moment is still curated evidence, so the system surfaces the work that appears meaningful and relevant enough to be useful in a review.
Requirements for AI drafting
A review template needs at least one open-text question for AI drafting to be used. If a template contains only ratings or metric questions, Enable 15Five AI cannot be used for that cycle, because there are no open-text questions for Moments to be matched to or for 15Five AI to draft answers for.
If you select Enable 15Five AI and the selected template contains metric questions only, an error state appears. To resolve it, add an open-text question to the template, select a template that has at least one open-text question, or change the review experience to Disable 15Five AI or the legacy experience.