AI is learning to detect bullying bosses. Should you trust it?

Some monitoring is necessary regardless, Hurley said. Organizations that rely purely on goodwill leave employees exposed to misconduct without consequences, which creates its own trust problem.

The bigger factor is how that monitoring gets introduced to employees in the first place. Hurley, whose research explains why trust is easy to lose and hard to rebuild, said it can’t just be an FYI memo. Instead, leaders need to make the case themselves.

“Here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we’re doing it. From the C-suite, deployed down throughout the workforce, face to face,” he said, adding that employees should ideally be involved in designing the system itself.

What the AI sees that humans can’t

Christopher To is an assistant professor of human resource management at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he teaches a new course on AI in HRM. He said the technology has two genuine advantages over human observers. It operates at scale, tracking a manager’s digital behavior across years and multiple subordinates, and it sees interactions that never happen in public.

“You might be on good terms with your manager face-to-face. But, behind closed doors and in the digital space, your manager may be a very different person to one of your coworkers,” he said.