HR giant Lattice announced last week that it would lead the way in the “responsible employment of AI” by being the first HR company to give AI workers official employment records. These “digital workers” would be onboarded, trained, and given performance reviews “just as any person would be,” which immediately led to confusion about how human workers would be impacted.
Three days after it announced the move, Lattice said it was shelving its digital worker plan, as first reported by Fortune.
“This innovation sparked a lot of conversation and questions that have no answers yet,” the update stated. “We look forward to continuing to work with our customers on the responsible use of AI, but will not further pursue digital workers in the product.”
In the original blog post, CEO Sarah Franklin wrote that Lattice would be “the first to give digital workers official employment records.”
“Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access, and even a manager,” Franklin wrote. “Just as any person would be.”
The blog post includes numerous example images of the Lattice interface, in which multiple real workers and one “digital worker” report to the same manager. The AI worker is clearly labeled as AI, and has its own sales goals.
Though Lattice is apparently no longer doing this, the idea that personified AI will work alongside real humans and that they will be managed using the same overbearing HR software that real people have to use is both an HR and AI fever dream that unfortunately many companies in both spaces are relentlessly pushing.
The AI in the sample images is Piper, a sales representative whose website states she “has all of the skills of your best SDR: she’s bright, hard-working, and crushes her pipeline targets.” Other AIs mentioned include Devin the hireable software engineer, Harvey the legal AI platform, and Salesforce’s automated service agent, Einstein. Of course, many companies have already begun doing mass layoffs of human workers and have either asked a smaller workforce to become more “efficient” by using AI tools or have replaced customer service workers with AI agents altogether.
“When we asked our Resources for Humans community of more than 22,000 HR leaders representing over 3 million employees about their plan for digital workers, over half told us they were already planning to hire them,” Franklin wrote in the post. “This marks a significant moment in the evolution of AI technology—the moment when the idea of an ‘AI employee’ moves from concept to reality in a system and into an org chart.”
Lattice canceled this development after everyone else seemed to agree it was a bad idea. Tom Smith, the senior director of organizing at Communications Workers of America, told 404 Media in a statement that, “It is completely unsurprising that a multibillion dollar corporation would pull a stunt like this after laying off 100 workers last year.”
It is unclear from the announcement how AI workers would be evaluated compared to human workers, and whether an AI’s performance would negatively impact the evaluations of everyone else on its team. It is also unclear how such bots would be paid.
The cruel irony in all of this is that performance reviews and endless performance metrics and feedback given to workers through HR management software like Lattice can often feel dehumanizing; meanwhile, the company has been working on personifying and anthropomorphizing AI agents that are not actually intelligent and are not human. Lattice is also injecting AI features into its software. It now advertises “AI generated onboarding videos,” AI writing tools for performance reviews, “personalized” employee growth plans that can be generated “with a click,” and chatbot-like features that supposedly answers questions like “Are we paying high performers enough?” and suggests how much someone’s raise should be. In one promotional video, an HR professional asks the chatbot “How do we fix this?” when faced with the problem of making remote workers feel engaged.
“AI is an incredibly powerful tool that should be used to ease workloads for human workers, creating economic gains by supporting worker outputs,” Smith said. “Simply announcing the integration of an AI bot is not true innovation.”
In response to Franklin’s LinkedIn post, many people commented variations of, “What.” Many more pointed out that in her announcement about making AI workers real, Franklin had signed off with the tagline, “Lattice. Because people.”
One person commented that this was “Terrifying. The more AI is being used all around, the more I am starting to be like this shit is going to ruin everything. Workers are already struggling enough and now they have to compete with ‘AI workers.’”
“This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company,” another person wrote. “Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as ‘resources’ to be optimized and measured against machines.”
Lattice did not respond to a request for comment about why it had pulled the initiative.
