Teams, Slack and co.

Surveillance dystopia: AI scans chats for emotions

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.