Business Tackling toxicity Artificial intelligence could become a tool in the arsenal of businesses looking to prevent employee misconduct and understand more about workplace culture but there is a fine balance to be struck. By Katie McQuater S ince the #MeToo movement prompted a global conversation about sexual harassment and uncovered multiple stories of workplace misconduct, the issue of how we behave at work is under more scrutiny than ever. At the same time, algorithms have become an inexorable part of modern life, and now as well as serving us recommendations on what to watch, listen to, or eat they are making an impact on the workplace and how people are managed. With businesses experimenting with new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to hire recruits and monitor performance, perhaps it was inevitable that the next frontier would be managing people and their behaviour. Advances in natural language processing have given rise to technologies designed to monitor written exchanges between employees, giving firms insights on how staff interact and detecting signs of bullying or harassment. While the use of AI to pick up harassment in 36 emails appears to be nascent according to the Guardian, such technology is being used by law firms in London it could become more commonplace as organisations try to stay one step ahead of misconduct and higher numbers of staff work remotely. However, applying technology to such a sensitive human problem raises questions over biases, culture, accuracy and trust. Transparency Just getting the data to make AI technologies robust in the first place could be difficult, according to Prasanna Tambe, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School, and co-author of a paper on applying AI within human resources management. For these systems to work well, you need to have a lot of instances in your data. If youre talking about one organisation, when you get down to harassment or toxic employees, you dont have a lot of examples. You need to have a lot of cases not just one or two, or even five or 10. Companies using such tools would also need to ensure they are transparent about how they are used and what decisions are based on. There are a range of AI technologies making recommendations based on a number of factors, and while some are transparent in how they reach decisions, others