How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages
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Aware uses AI to analyze companies' employee messages across Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other communications services.

Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages::Aware uses AI to analyze companies’ employee messages across Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other communications services.

  • Asidonhopo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    10 months ago

    A lot of retailers are replacing their standard phone systems with products from Zoom and other AI transcription enabled providers. In environments with audio recording, its reasonable to assume that relatively soon, full transcripts of conversations identified to individual speakers will be easily obtained, summarized and analyzed by AI. This will hopefully soon come under scrutiny for violating both two- and one-party consent laws for audio recording.

    • Billiam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      In a two-party-consent state, maybe.

      But in a one-party-consent state, all that Personnel Human Resources People Ops will do is point to a clause in your onboarding paperwork where you agreed to be recorded while on company property using company telephony equipment as a condition of your employment.

      • Asidonhopo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        As long as that’s in the employee paperwork it protects companies from some liability, but what about customer-employee or customer-customer conversations picked up by the system? I suppose a sign stating that video and audio conversations being recorded would further lessen employer liability but I imagine in the future laws about AI technology used on those convos will be put in place and the use of surreptious AI conversation analytics in retail environments will be more regulated. For now though it sure seems like a free for all and I wouldn’t be surprised at unethical use becoming somewhat common.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      It’s already been ocurring for a while now without the summary and analysis by AI.

      Automatic audio transcription has been kicking around for a long time now, at various levels of accuracy. The only important distinction of the speaking party is which side of the call (employee or customer) it’s coming from, and that doesn’t require any complicated analysis, just that your recordings capture incoming and outgoing audio on separate channels (which is how phone calls work in the first place).

      As far as consent goes, any time you hear “this call may be monitored for training purposes” and stay on the line, as a customer you have consented to the recording. As an employee they usually just include it in your contract or one of the many things they get every employee to sign. Only really matters from a business standpoint if someone is willing to take you to court over it.

      Most call center software/systems have these options built in at this point.