Dive Brief:
- Managers who use artificial intelligence at work are turning to the technology to help them make staff cuts, with 59% saying they use AI when deciding who to lay off and 58% saying they use AI when deciding who to fire, according to a new survey from ResumeTemplates.com.
- While 57% of managers reported that they would never let AI make layoff decisions without supervising the process, 43% said they occasionally take a hands-off approach and 17% said they do it “often or all the time.” However, 91% said they “would override an AI layoff recommendation they disagreed with.”
- Among managers who said they were confident about AI’s layoff decisions, 80% said they let it run unsupervised at least occasionally, compared with only about half (52%) of the “somewhat confident” managers. Meanwhile, 38% of managers overall said they had never been trained on the ethical use of AI in making HR decisions.
Dive Insight:
The survey involved 1,000 U.S. managers with direct reports, all of whom use AI at work. It found that 1 in 4 managers use AI to help decide who gets laid off “often or all the time.”
When managers do use AI to help decide layoffs, 80% ask the tech to weigh performance and productivity scores, while 57% ask AI to consider attendance and 42% ask the tech to look at salary or cost. Almost one-third (31%) direct AI to “consider frequent sick days or medical leave.”
Other factors managers said they have AI weigh are tenure (32%), paid time off (23%) and age (14%).
“Sick days, medical leave, and age stand apart from the factors a layoff usually turns on, because discrimination based on age, disability, or protected medical leave is illegal,” Julia Toothacre, chief career strategist at ResumeTemplates.com, said in a statement. “A decision that weighs someone’s health or age sits on very different legal ground than one based on their work.”
Many managers (58%) said they can’t confirm if their company has tested the AI they use for bias, while 23% said it was not tested.
“The biggest risks here are discrimination claims and wrongful-termination claims,” Toothacre said. “When the managers using AI were never trained on it, and the company cannot confirm the tool was tested for bias, there is no way to know what it weighs or whether the decision is defensible. That gap is where those claims start.”
Among managers who use AI to make layoff decisions, 34% said they’ve asked AI to decide whether a person’s job could be done by AI, amounting to 20% of all managers surveyed. In addition, 44% of managers said they were asked to decide whether AI could replace a role, and 75% said it could.
A recent report from PYX Labs, a research lab sponsored by Perceptyx, found that AI had trouble handling nuance and complex results, particularly when it came to interpreting and understanding open-ended employee feedback. And at a June SHRM26 session, a leadership expert told the audience that AI has a tendency to focus on what already exists instead of a worker’s potential.
