On September 3, 2026, an industrial robot is operating on a production line manufacturing new energy auto parts at Jinhua Chi New Technology Co., Ltd. in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, China.
Video Visual China Group | Getty Images
So what’s the HR department supposed to do when the first employee comes to the company’s HR department to complain about a robot co-worker or an overzealous AI scheduling assistant?
You may introduce “robot-related” to your employees.
The idea may sound like science fiction, but it’s one that has somehow surfaced in discussions about the impact of AI on jobs, and is intended to pre-empt future workplace issues in the not-too-distant future.
“In an emerging AI-based world, employees’ concerns will no longer center on their interactions with colleagues, but with AI agents, cobots, and large-scale language models,” Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in a commentary in July.
Humans will interact with a variety of AI technologies, from assistants to agents to chatbots. Additionally, in the physical world (e.g., manufacturing spaces), you will be interacting with cobots that can become core partners in your working relationships. If you can imagine all the ways that human resources might have to resolve tensions between human employees, West wrote, then apply that to human resistance to technological change and you can see what’s coming. And because most existing employee support systems from the industrial era are ill-equipped to handle the frustrations, challenges, and anxieties of the AI era, “companies need to supplement HR with robot relations (RR),” West wrote.
West may be one of the only people to ever specifically use the term “RR,” but what he meant has been a hot topic in human resources circles.
Complaints that human workers might have about AI
We anticipate that complaints from human employees will be diverse and potentially difficult to address. If I resist, could I be forced to use AI in my work? Which mistake was made on the project? Is it the human worker’s fault or the AI’s?
Tensions between humans and AI in the workplace already exist, with claims that algorithms currently used by human resources departments are unfair or biased and could even be used to identify employees for termination. A bill recently passed by the California State Assembly with an overwhelming majority would ban the use of “robo bosses” to fire or discipline workers. It awaits the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has until the end of September to sign it or veto it. Newsom vetoed an earlier version of the bill in October, saying changes were needed, and sponsors say the new bill reflects those changes.
At an experimental store in San Francisco run by AI company Andon Labs, an AI system called Luna was given responsibility for running a significant portion of the business, including hiring, scheduling, and managing employees. In August, Luna first recommended that employees be fired. The attention generated by this AI management experiment was one of the reasons California lawmakers moved to limit automated decision-making in the workplace.
Meta is facing a lawsuit filed in July. Former employees allege that the AI-assisted system was used to rank and select employees for layoffs, unfairly influencing employees who took sick or family leave. Mr. Mehta denies the allegations.
A May survey released by United for Respect, a nonprofit organization with roots in the labor movement and the retail industry in particular, found that employees at Walmart and Amazon are increasingly concerned that personnel decisions are being automated. Amazon said the survey represents a fraction of its millions of employees. Walmart shareholders in June rejected a nonprofit group’s proposal for more reporting on workplace automation and its impact on the workforce, but Walmart executives say they are already providing transparency.
The AI governance nonprofit says companies have more to consider disclosing as the AI era advances. According to Just Capital, which studies business leadership through analysis of corporate disclosures, half of major U.S. companies do not disclose the AI issues that are most important to Americans, and that humans are responsible for or at least kept informed about. Just Capital said a recent review of more than 1,000 companies’ disclosures on AI governance, data protection, and workforce impact, including reviews of eight technology “hyperscalers,” found that most were limited in detail.
The International Labor Organization defines algorithmic management as systems that organize, assign, monitor, supervise, and evaluate work without human managers doing all the work, and says the use of these systems is steadily increasing across industries from customer service to transportation, logistics, banking, and healthcare.
The ILO said in a recent report that while AI systems’ recommendations and real-time information can “enhance professional judgment,” they can also mandate certain workflows, standardize procedures and reduce the discretion of human employees. “These changes impact job satisfaction, skill utilization and the meaning workers derive from their work,” the report says.
The ILO expects these developments to spread to more high-level jobs that were previously defined by autonomy, and sees further reason for workers to be concerned. “Integrating AI into work processes often involves expanding data collection and monitoring. AI systems can track output, behavior, and work cadences in real time, enabling new forms of performance measurement. Although this may improve coordination, , concerns about digitally driven surveillance and information asymmetries between employers and workers may also arise; workers may not always be aware of what data is being collected and how it will be used, especially where regulatory safeguards are weak,” the ILO writes.
Algorithmic management software is widely adopted in many countries, with the US leading the way, with 90% of executives saying their company has at least one tool in place to “coach, monitor and evaluate employees,” according to an OECD survey released late last year.
Unions are already fighting AI, but many workers are left without protections
According to an MIT review of the early days of the generative AI era, unions representing workers are actively addressing AI issues in collective bargaining that covers many core areas of workers’ interests and history, including retraining, new employment opportunities, and adjustments to compensation models that allow employees to share in the productivity of new technologies, as well as severance pay and early retirement incentives. It also calls for more specific AI protections, such as the use of personal data and the use of AI-generated data specific to employee discipline. “These will be cutting-edge issues in collective bargaining across a wide range of companies and industries,” the MIT researchers wrote.
For private-sector workers without union representation, a division within a company may be the only option.
“I think the idea of creating such a department, or of extending the powers of the existing human resources department in this direction, is worth taking seriously,” said Orestis Papakiriakopoulos, a social computing professor at the Technical University of Munich. Social computing is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on how new technologies affect and shape human society.
He said RR could address questions such as how AI agents and AI-based systems impact employees’ well-being, empowerment, professional growth, and career trajectories, and “when they might instead create barriers to progress.”
“We need to assess how AI is changing what we value in the workplace,” Papakiriakopoulos said. “We need to think about how to protect our workforce, upskill and reskill them, and clearly define the types of impact and contributions that should be valued in an AI-mediated workplace.”
Papakiriakopoulos said his team was already facing tense situations with projects that required them to develop AI systems for the workplace, with employees proving reluctant to participate. Papakiriakopoulos said employees are intentionally withholding information, providing inaccurate information, or otherwise sabotaging the process because they are concerned about their position within the company and how the introduction of AI will affect their job security.
He said that “employees may already perceive the introduction of AI as having the potential to impact their power, status, and employment prospects,” making the RR sector a much-needed organizational idea.
Other experts say humans will need to be taught how to interact with machines, but that’s only part of the question posed. Society needs to decide what happens when the interests of humans and machine owners differ.
“Many so-called AI-driven systems are designed to reduce workers to mere extensions of machines, with employees often required to monitor automated workflows, resolve malfunctions, troubleshoot sensitive equipment, and intervene if machines break down,” said Christina Zaga, assistant professor at the University of Twente. “Workers end up upholding the limits of automation,” she added.
Zaga says that as we face new relationships between workers and machines, thinking goes beyond “new colleagues” to include new “means of production” owned and controlled by corporations.
She argues that a properly conceived new organizational sector will not be designed with the overarching goal of keeping humans satisfied with machines, but with the goal of giving workers a meaningful role in the governance and design of automation.
It may not be called “robot relations,” but it may mean that the “worker and automation relations” department, or whatever you prefer, will be part of the office of the future.
