How Companies Use AI to Monitor Employee Messages
Companies like Walmart, Delta, Chevron, and Starbucks are using AI technology to monitor employee messages and track sentiments and toxicity.
AI Monitoring of Employee Messages
AI firm, Aware, specializes in analyzing employee messages and has been hired by companies like Walmart, Delta, T-Mobile, Chevron, and Starbucks.
The data repository of Aware contains messages from more than 3 million employees, representing about 20 billion individual interactions.
Aware's AI models can track sentiments, identify bullying, harassment, discrimination, noncompliance, pornography, and other behaviors in employee messages.
Controversy and Concerns
Jutta Williams, co-founder of Humane Intelligence, expresses concerns about AI employee surveillance technology, stating that it treats people like inventory and becomes thought crime.
Employee surveillance AI is part of the larger AI market, which has seen significant growth recently.
Aware's revenue has jumped 150% per year on average over the past five years.
Aware's Approach and Privacy Concerns
Aware's analytics tool can provide insights into employee sentiment and toxicity without flagging individual employee names.
However, its separate eDiscovery tool can identify extreme threats or risk behaviors and provide employee names for HR investigations.
Privacy concerns arise as data aggregation and anonymization may not guarantee complete privacy and security, and AI models can make accurate inferences and guesses based on aggregated data.
