The AI Act may not reach most workplace surveillance - The Next Web

The Next Web has published an article headlined "The AI Act may not reach most workplace surveillance." It reports on an OECD employer survey of 6,047 firms across six countries. The survey examined employers' use of software in the workplace, and specifically the use of software to sanction poor performance.

Six countries were surveyed in total, four of them European. The survey therefore sets employers in one country against employers in four others. The OECD attributes the gap to regulatory architecture.

The article also reports the OECD's warning that most of these tools are not AI. That distinction matters for the legislation named in the headline: rules written specifically for artificial intelligence do not apply to tools that fall outside that definition. The figures concern software used to sanction poor performance specifically. The headline's framing is that the AI Act may not reach most workplace surveillance of this kind. The article's focus is therefore the distance between the software employers use to sanction performance and the rules written for artificial intelligence.