Teams, Slack and co.

Surveillance dystopia: AI scans chats for emotions

(Bild: BullRun - stock.adobe.com)

In the flexible modern working world with home and remote working, employees are increasingly communicating via digital channels such as Microsoft Teams or the business chat Slack. This opens up a new opportunity for management to monitor staff: A US start-up has developed an AI emotion scanner that converts chats between employees in real time into a mood report for the boardroom.

Anyone who works for a large corporation such as Walmart, T-Mobile, Starbucks or the oil giant Chevron in the USA must expect their chats with other employees to be processed and analyzed by machines. All of these companies - which have more than three million employees in total - are customers of the seven-year-old start-up Aware, which integrates a kind of real-time emotion monitoring into office messengers (Teams, Slack, Zoom). Aware entices managers with the prospect of being able to look into the minds of their employees - and is causing sheer horror among data protectionists.