Workplace surveillance is becoming an AI product. Employers are using software to monitor worker activity and interactions, turning ordinary jobs into continuous performance assessments with little room for privacy.
In the UK, the Co-op is reportedly using AI models to record and monitor what its human employees say, then evaluate their interactions with customers. The system uses an OpenAI model to assess more than 50 different aspects of each phone call and assign pass and fail scores.
Depending on how much time workers spend speaking with customers, the AI can monitor them for up to several hours each day. One Co-op employee described the experience in blunt terms: “You are being watched.”
The same employee said the system captures “absolutely every word that you say and every time that you utter something.” Another description was less technical and more revealing: “It just feels really dystopian. It’s the thin end of the wedge.”
Monitoring Becomes Part of the Job
The Co-op described AI as a “key aspect of our quality assurance processes” and said it serves only as a support tool, not a decision maker. That distinction may sound reassuring, but a system that scores more than 50 parts of a conversation still changes how workers perform their jobs — especially when those scores produce pass and fail results.
The Co-op example sits within a wider workplace shift. In the US, an estimated 61 percent of workplaces are already using AI analytics software to gauge worker productivity. The software does not need to make a final decision to influence behavior; workers know that a system is measuring them, and that knowledge becomes part of the job.
Burger King began forcing employees to wear AI-powered headsets earlier this year. The headsets monitor interactions with customers and beam commands from a chatbot called Patty, placing a machine between workers and the people they serve.
Meta also nearly sparked a mini-mutiny after rolling out a tool to track workers’ keystrokes and screens to train AI models. The company paused the tool after it exposed intimate data. A system designed to collect workplace information had managed to demonstrate the central problem with collecting workplace information.
When Software Starts Acting Like Management
John Chadfield, national officer of the Communication Workers Union, warned that AI is being presented as an answer before employers have shown that it solves a real problem. “AI is sold as the solution to every problem, but examples like this make it clear that it can diminish sensible workplace practices and intensify working lives for no reason,” he said.
That concern reaches beyond one company or one headset. AI monitoring can turn judgment calls into scores, make constant observation feel normal, and intensify work without explaining why the extra pressure is needed.
Chadfield also argued that unaccountable computer systems should not be managers. The point is not that every AI tool makes employment decisions by itself; it is that monitoring systems can shape those decisions and workplace behavior without the accountability expected from a human manager.
The companies involved are presenting these systems as quality assurance, productivity measurement, customer service support, or AI training. The workers experiencing them encounter something else: surveillance that follows every call, keystroke, screen, and interaction.
That gap matters. Once employers treat constant monitoring as an ordinary part of work, privacy becomes an exception rather than a basic condition of employment. The technology may be new, but the management logic is old — watch more, measure more, and call the pressure innovation.
Based on
- Bosses Deploying AI-Powered Spyware That Watches Workers Constantly — futurism.com
- Employees all over the world find themselves monitored by AI at work | Technology | The Guardian — theguardian.com
- Is your boss watching you? The rise of AI surveillance at work – video | Science | The Guardian — theguardian.com
