More companies are buying tools that use AI to help manage people. Some summarise your work into draft performance reviews. Some suggest who is ready for promotion based on project data. Some score activity in the tools you use every day. They are sold as a way to make decisions fairer and faster, and some of them may well help.
The law is starting to take this seriously. The European Union's AI Act treats AI systems used to make decisions about promotion and termination, to allocate work based on people's behaviour or traits, or to monitor and evaluate workers' performance, as high risk. That brings obligations for the companies that build and use them, including human oversight. Employers using such a system are also expected to tell workers and their representatives before it is put into use. The Act already bans AI that tries to recognise emotions at work, except for medical or safety reasons. In the EU and the UK, data protection law also gives you rights around decisions made solely by automated means.
You do not need to be a lawyer to act on this. You need to notice what a tool is measuring, and how your work looks to it.
Think about where your best work actually shows up. Commits and closed tickets are easy for software to count. Unblocking a colleague, reviewing someone's design carefully, or talking a team out of a bad idea usually leave much fainter traces. If a tool is part of how you are judged, make that invisible work visible in writing. Short notes in your own words of what you did and what changed because of it.
Ask questions early, politely and in writing. Is any software involved in reviews or promotion decisions? What data does it use? Who checks its output, and can I see what it said about me? A good employer will have answers, and asking shows you care about fairness, not that you are making trouble.
And if you become a manager, treat any score as the start of a conversation, never the end of one. The people who will be trusted with these tools are the ones who can explain every decision without pointing at the screen.
– Asael Shinder
