AI and employment law: An introduction to artificial intelligence, human resources — and layoffs

Companies are increasingly using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to guide employment decisions, including analyzing workforce data to identify redundancies and potential layoffs, with some reports indicating the technology was used behind the scenes in recent job cuts at Verizon. Although AI is disrupting industries such as technology by automating coding and other tasks, experts say health care remains relatively insulated because it is largely patient-facing and dependent on human interaction. Christopher S. Mayer, J.D., an employment law specialist with the firm Frier Levitt, introduces an emerging area of employment law.

Medical Economics: Can you describe the current workplace or workforce situation around the adoption of AI and businesses laying off employees, especially how they're using AI to guide human resources decisions?

Christopher S. Mayer, J.D.: We're starting to all see it on two fronts, really. And the first front is that AI, generative AI primarily, is now being used by players to make employment-related decisions. So they will feed their workforce factors into AI and try to determine, using AI and the algorithms in AI, to determine who should be eliminated, what jobs are redundant, can be replaced. So we're seeing that more and more, and a lot of that's going on behind the scenes, but it does leak out from companies that have used AI for these purposes. And Verizon is kind of a recent example; we could talk about that. Verizon did about 3,000 layoffs recently, and they didn't really cite AI as part of it, but it kind of leaked out that AI was, in some ways, behind the scenes. And the other thing that we're seeing, in addition to the use of AI to make employment-related decisions, layoff decisions, is that AI is obviously disrupting workforces across all industries. And we'll talk about health care, but it doesn't matter what the industry is, really every industry is going to be impacted, it appears, by AI in some way, and that is resulting in some redundancies, elimination of jobs being considered, and there's a lot of fear out there, obviously. None of us understands fully what AI means for the future, and I think that includes the people who are developing these AI tools and are investing so much in it; we don’t fully know where it’s going. And no one knows fully whether their jobs are going to be impacted by it. And I think in the tech industry in particular, I think when AI first started coming out and the rumors about it, I think coders and other people in the tech industry just assumed that they were going to be a big part of it, and their jobs were safe forever. And that's not how it's played out. I mean, AI, as it turns out, is making a lot of those coding-type jobs completely irrelevant, or unnecessary, because AI could do it faster, better. There needs to be some human element still, in terms of programming it or plugging in the information. But a lot of those jobs are going by the wayside. So it's, it's hard to really predict the impact completely. But the good thing for health care is that health care is one of the industries that is, primarily remote for the most part, immune to a huge impact of AI replacing jobs. I mean, obviously, health care is a patient-facing industry, and humans will always be a big part of that, and that's not going to change.