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As AI creeps into seemingly every corner of the workplace, a new California bill—Senate Bill 7, known as the “No Robo Bosses Act”—is attempting to limit its ability to boss humans around. The proposed law targets AI and similar automated digital systems from completely taking over a key aspect of the workplace: managing promotions or handling problems with a staff member. The bill would prevent companies from “primarily” relying on software to decide if a person should be promoted, disciplined, or fired.
The bill attempts to ensure that there’s always a human in the loop when it comes to some critical staff management decisions—keeping the “human” in “human resources.” If an automated system is used, the bill says someone would have to review the decision and “compile corroborating or supporting information,” to ensure that the decision is sound, the Mercury News explains. The newspaper quoted Senator Jerry McNerney, a Democrat who represents Stockton’s 5th District, who introduced the bill. He explained that we really “don’t want these automated decision-making systems to operate without any oversight” when it comes to really personal, human issues like someone’s working life and career.
McNerney’s office released a list of companies that sell “bossware” to illustrate the issues his bill would tackle. Some of the products on his list would violate parts of his bill—including software that tries to determine a worker’s mental state, the Mercury News notes. Inferring the condition of worker’s mental health based on work data is clearly contentious, and while some AI companies promise that their systems can do this kind of analysis properly, a report late in 2024 suggested those claims aren’t backed up by science. And in Europe, the first EU AI act specifically bars AI systems from being used to determine a user’s emotions.
The No Robo Bosses bill did originally contain a clause that also banned companies from using AI technology or other automated systems to fully automate the hiring process. This provision was removed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The California Chamber of commerce, which opposes the bill, objected to the ban on automated hiring. It argued that only the smallest companies would be able to comply—simply due to the small number of job positions they had to advertise and recruit for.
Larger companies have pivoted to using AI as a key part of the hiring process, but commentators have noted that even as AI allows some streamlining of the complex process of recruiting new employees by filtering a long list of applicants, for example, it also introduces its own problems. It’s known that generative AI models can be biased, and they can hallucinate, simply making up data or decisions.
The march of AI into typical HR processes is likely to continue, though. Recently, Microsoft released an agent AI-based update to its Microsoft 365 workplace productivity suite that includes a “skills inference agent” and a “skills management agent,” which can automatically identify your workforces’ skills and build a useful table to help you better manage employee training tasks. Doubters may worry about the automatic aspect of this system, skeptical of AI’s promise and the risks it presents, because training is key to a worker’s long term employment prospects.
Why should you care about the No Robo Bosses bill?
If you’re based in California and the bill is signed into law, it will impact how your company uses AI for the human resources tasks the bill covers. But even if your company is based elsewhere, the bill might give you pause. Are you deploying AI systems and blindly trusting them to make big decisions that can seriously impact your workers’ lives? If so, maybe you want to ensure that there’s a human in the loop to make sure the AI makes the right decision.
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