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Last month, news surfaced that major companies like Walmart, Starbucks and Chevron were using AI to monitor employee communications. The reaction online was swift, with employees and workplace advocates worrying about a loss of privacy.

Last month, news surfaced that major companies like Walmart, Starbucks, Delta and Chevron were using AI to monitor employee communications. The reaction online was swift, with employees and workplace advocates worrying about a loss of privacy. But experts say that while AI tools might be new, watching, reading and tracking employee conversations is far from novel. AI might be more efficient at it — and the technology might raise some new ethical and legal challenges, as well as risk alienating employees — but the fact is workplace conversations have never really been private anyway. “Monitoring employee communications isn’t new, but the growing sophistication of the analysis that’s possible with ongoing advances in AI is,” said David Johnson, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. “What’s also evolving is the industry’s understanding of how monitoring in this way impacts employee behavior and morale under various circumstances, along with the policies and boundaries for acceptable use within the workplace.” A recent study by a company called Qualtrics, which uses AI to help filter employee engagement surveys, found that managers are bullish on AI software but that employees are nervous, with 46% calling its use in the workplace “scary.” “Trust is lost in buckets and gained back in drops, so missteps in applying the technology early will have a long tail of implications for employee trust over time,” said Johnson, even as he called a future of AI-powered employee monitoring “inevitable.”