AI Used to Monitor Employee Efficiency

The information being analysed is human behaviour. By tracking regular metadata, the AI can get a picture of the employees’ normal routines at work, and then flag anomalies in those routines, even in real time. If someone posed a security risk by stepping outside of their normal pattern of behaviour, they could be caught. 

Such behavioural risks include the accessing or copying of large numbers of files not usual to that employee. The technology will register it as anomalous behaviour and it then needs to be investigated whether that behaviour is just the employee doing their job, or doing something potentially harmful, such as stealing confidential information, or even accidentally opening a phishing email and allowing a virus to enter the system.

The right to privacy is in contrast to the use of a technology like this, with fears that employees won’t necessarily have consented to its use or even know that their employer has deployed it. It is up to companies how they utilise an AI like this, but there is the associated risk of employees not agreeing to the monitoring policy, or being unhappy about the lack of choice over its use.

It can be used for retrospective analysis, by storing employee metadata even after they have left, placing great importance on data protection, and it can be used to surveil employee productivity, tracking how efficient they are when they work from home, for example.