Workplace surveillance is being supercharged by AI that lets employers create custom tools to watch their worker’s every move.
In the UK, the legal services company the Co-op is reportedly using AI models to constantly record and monitor what its human employees say and evaluate their interactions with customers.
According to a scoop from The Guardian, what one whistleblower called an “oppressive and dystopian” system uses an OpenAI model trained to assess more than 50 different aspects of each phone call and give pass and fail scores.
Depending on how much time they spend speaking to customers, workers are sometimes monitored by AI for up to several hours each day, one worker said.
“You are being watched,” an employee at the Co-op told The Guardian. “It’s different from occasionally being listened to for compliance purposes. [You are] being monitored absolutely every word that you say and every time that you utter something… It just feels really dystopian. It’s the thin end of the wedge.”
It’s yet another example of how AI is dramatically reshaping the workplace. If it isn’t being used to automate or replace jobs, it’s intensifying work by increasing the workload that employees are expected to do. Or in the case of places like the Co-op, it’s being put to optimize operations by codifying every employee interaction into a data point that can be graded by supervisors.
In the US, an estimated 61 percent of workplaces are already using AI analytics software to gauge worker productivity, according to a survey.
Earlier this year, Burger King began forcing employees to wear AI-powered headsets to monitor the friendliness of their interactions with customers and beam them commands from a chatbot called Patty. Meta nearly sparked a mini-mutiny earlier this summer when it rolled out a tool to track workers keystrokes and their screens and use that data to train its AI models, before pausing it after it exposed the intimate data.
In a statement to The Guardian, the Co-op downplayed the dystopian characterizations and called AI a “key aspect of our quality assurance processes.” AI, it further insisted, is used only as a support tool, not a decision maker.
Experts aren’t convinced that AI’s presence in the workplace is so benign.
“AI is sold as the solution to every problem, but examples like this make it clear that it can diminish sensible workplace practices and intensify working lives for no reason,” John Chadfield, the national officer of the Communication Workers Union, told The Guardian. “Unaccountable computer systems should not be people’s managers, and these hard-working employees demand far more respect.”
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