Sick days. Age. Tenure. A chunk of managers admit they’re feeding exactly those things into a chatbot and letting it flag who gets cut. A survey covered by HR Dive found bosses aren’t just using AI to draft the awkward email. They’re using it to pick the name.
Remember the pitch on this stuff? AI was going to take the boring work off your plate so humans could handle the human calls. Firing someone is about as human as it gets. And here we are, with the machine sorting people by how old they are and how many days they called in sick. The tool that was supposed to free up your manager is now the thing your manager hides behind.
The bot doesn’t know you called in sick to nurse a dying parent. It sees the sick days and the tenure and the age, and it does the math. If your company runs cuts through a model like this, the way to protect yourself shifts: document your wins in writing, because a spreadsheet can’t count the stuff that never got logged.
And when one of these layoffs sorts by age and gets challenged in court, watch closely. That’s where the AI-cut-my-job story stops being a survey stat and starts being expensive for the people who trusted the bot.
The line they fed you for years was that hard work and a long tenure buy you loyalty back. Then a manager pipes your sick days and your age into a chatbot and lets it draw the line.
Here’s the part that should sting: 20 years of showing up is now a data point, and the model doesn’t know you carpooled to the office through two snowstorms. It just knows the number. Tenure used to be armor. Turns out it’s just an input.
Sources: hrdive.com
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