First, let me tell you that I understand this won't be a popular post as it contains no memes or complaints and a large amount of text. I understand that and still hope it reaches the right audiences.
I am an engineer focusing on AI in Microsoft environments. I have been in the industry for 20 years and lately I have seen a very disturbing trend emerging and my worst fears were confirmed in recent days.
For background… Companies have been shifting into public cloud based communications platforms for business. Office365 and Azure AD being the main tool being used by companies big and small to drive their business operations.
One thing that was always made very clear to us in the industry is that the big 3 (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) recognized about 10 years ago that putting all of your eggs into one basket was the only way to draw out the power of artificial intelligence to further improve the products and workloads.
Fast forward to present day, where 99% of companies utilize a form of cloud based computing for their corporate communications. Exchange online, Gsuite, Teams, SharePoint, Onedrive, Google Drive, etc.
This puts these large companies in a great spot to use machine learning to gather insights about how employees work.
Now for the big news… In the next year Microsoft will be releasing AI backed 'compliance tools' that are powerful enough to understand when an employee:
- Will be most likely to leave a company or stick around, based on patterns in language, work type, engagement metrics, and position.
1a. This is incredibly disturbing. Microsoft's Purview service advertises this feature as 'understanding when an employee is likely to leave a company to prevent data exfiltration'. But it is going to be so much more than that. Now your company will have a filter, with high confidence, that can predict employees that will leave the company.
1b. Using this filter, the employees enter 2 buckets.
Bucket A – Retain talent (top producers or subject matter experts). Tool tells employer the most likely reasons why the top talent is unhappy and makes recommendations such as retraining, work life balance shifts, compensation, promotions, or promoting company value.
Bucket B – Knowledge transfer and prepare for exit. In the near future, your career might be stopped dead in its tracks just based on machine learning letting your employer know it is time to prepare for your departure.
Needless to say, you will never know that you are in labeled in bucket B and that your entire career is over or set back by many years.
It doesn't stop there with machine learning. These are the other items being focused on:
Potential for corporate sabotage
Potential for exchanging value for gifts and services
Potential for money laundering or embezzlement
Potential for insider trading or stock manipulation
Potential for unauthorized disclosure of information or corporate espionage
Potential for workplace collusion and unionization efforts.
That's right… within the next 2-3 years you may end up with one of these labels. For 90% of the workers who get tagged, the tags will be exactly right. For the other 10%, you were caught in the crossfire.
I'm surprised the media hasn't picked up on this yet. Microsoft for example is being very secretive about the implications of these tools, but here is a reference : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93251