Businesses have officially moved from the “experimentation” stage to the “integration” stage of utilizing artificial intelligence (“AI”) in business operations. AI tools are increasingly being used in the entire lifecycle of the employment relationship, from recruitment to termination and everything in between, including such things as performance management and scheduling. While these tools can maximize efficiency, they present many legal considerations that companies should be aware of.
It is important to understand that the use of AI in any capacity compromises privacy. As such, the use of AI tools in managing any stage of the employment relationship implicates privacy laws which govern collection, processing, and storage of personally identifiable information (“PII”). Unfortunately, the United States does not have a unified legal framework when it comes to privacy law but instead has a patchwork of state and federal laws that may or may not apply depending on the industry, methods of collection, reasons for processing, and means of storage. Depending on the type of PII, your business’s sector, and the nature of your use of the data, you could implicate federal laws like HIPAA, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or state laws like the Florida Security of Communications Act or the California Consumer Privacy Act.
