The expansion of artificial intelligence in companies is already entering office employment with a dual effect. It reduces costs for companies and, at the same time, puts at risk jobs that until recently depended on administrative tasks, customer service, or routine management.
The contradiction, according to the experts who participated in the Mobile World Capital Barcelona, is that a technology presented as support for work is beginning to replace it. Since 2024, a 16% reduction in young workers has been detected linked to the use of artificial intelligence, because companies consider it faster and cheaper.
María Luz Rodríguez warned that the worker's voice is already training the bots
María Luz Rodríguez, professor of Labor Law and Social Security at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, focused on how the data used to train automatic systems is obtained. She cited the case of call centers, where the recording affects not only the customer but also the employee.
"Call centers announce that they record calls to improve service, registering your voice, but also the worker's voice, because with their voice they train the bots so that, the next time we call, an automatic voice answers us" - María Luz Rodríguez, professor of Labor Law and Social Security, University of Castilla-La Mancha
Rodríguez argued that one of the fundamental issues is to determine whose data is used to train algorithms and artificial intelligence. She added that the employment contract does not cover the capture of worker data throughout the day.
Furthermore, she argued that labor representatives must participate in the governance of technological transformation. In her opinion, social dialogue, collective bargaining, and formulas of co-management and business co-governance will be key to ordering this change.
In her speech, she also warned about the scale of the impact. She maintained that artificial intelligence will be a tsunami in the labor market and that it will affect 70% of jobs, with a gap between better-valued technological jobs and low-wage care jobs.
Eva Rimbau maintained that excessive control breaks the link with the company
Eva Rimbau, co-director of the online MBA at the Open University of Catalonia, linked the implementation of these tools with the way companies manage their staff. She recalled that companies that take care of their workers with training, decent wages, or job stability obtain better returns.
"It has been shown that companies that take care of their workers, with training, decent wages, or job stability, have better returns" - Eva Rimbau, co-director of the online MBA, Open University of Catalonia
Rimbau warned that intensive control in teleworking environments, such as click tracking, causes detachment in the staff because it breaks the psychological contract. She also pointed out that a dismissal linked to decisions based on artificial intelligence can be accepted if it is perceived as fair, but it generates a rupture when the worker interprets that there is injustice.
As she explained, technology previously complemented human tasks and is now beginning to replace them. In this scenario, she placed human transversal skills, including the ability to criticize and question, as a margin of protection.
Rimbau also warned of cognitive offloading. Delegating the most difficult part of the work to artificial intelligence can lead, she said, to forgetting how it is done, so that the decision on which functions to cede remains in the individual sphere.
Europe already exports its rules while companies test internal limits
Faced with the advance of these practices, Rodríguez maintained that Europe is limiting the most harmful elements of artificial intelligence with regulations such as the European Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles. She framed it within a process of digital constitutionalism.
The two experts agreed that the so-called Brussels effect is already in operation. Under this logic, non-European multinationals end up adopting European data protection rules on a global scale to adjust their activity to that regulatory framework.
Rimbau closed with a warning about so-called artificial intelligence agent graveyards. She explained that some organizations developed their own agents and stopped using them when the process for which they had been created changed.