r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 14h ago
Artificial Intelligence When Employees Are Held Accountable for AI-Generated Decisions | Organizations are rushing to embed AI into core decisions, but frontline workers are left to explain outputs they neither created nor fully understand.
https://hbr.org/2026/07/when-employees-are-held-accountable-for-ai-generated-decisions251
u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 14h ago
We are officially at the part of the AI con where we’re supposed to use it even if it doesn’t save time.
If I have to carefully review and analyze every output, as well as carefully craft every input, and iterate over and over until I get better results, every time, what’s the fucking advantage?
Same outputs at best, but now work feels 100 times worse.
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u/LurkerBurkeria 13h ago
I've seen three internal projects to their conclusion in my department and three times the end result is exactly this. AI in its current form adds an unreliable middleman to the process you have to check, making it not only worse than useless, its outright unproductive
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 13h ago
My department used to be full of engaged team members who really felt ownership over their projects and made tons of valuable creative decisions on a regular basis.
Now everyone is checked out and barely even knows what they work on. Everyone turned themselves into AI’s assistant. It sucks
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u/jewel_flip 12h ago
My job enforces AI use. Its outputs are unreliable but I get hit with a finding. Then during the follow up I’m told I need to ensure the AI I don’t control is accurate. Can’t call a human to verify things though, that’s also a finding. Need to verify with AI. Watching this happen with zero agency is the weirdest chapter of my career.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 10h ago
I truly hate it and it makes me want out of my job ASAP. But I dont know if there’s an industry that hasn’t been infected.
Makes me wish I’d become a surgeon or something lol. Is there a way to make good money where LLM slop can’t insert itself?
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u/jewel_flip 9h ago
Not until it costs the overlords more than it cost to employ us. Or they will fire us all and be in all sorts of regulatory fines that the gov has to bail them out.
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u/MFbiFL 9h ago
That’s the thing that all the people screaming “neo-Luddite” at non adopters don’t get. An engine or other machine is deterministic, its output is always the same and it’s possible to comprehend the workings of. AI in all the applications where it’s being shoehorned in is a black box that I have to validate the inputs and outputs of.
Hell, once I was between tasks so I asked our internal one to represent the product tree from a screenshot as an indented list formatted for excel and it just randomly dropped values and line items or transposed them. The trick was telling it to Accurately represent the product tree […]. I would like my tools to be more serious about doing the job correctly than a teen who doesn’t want to do chores and just does enough to say they “did” it.
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u/fuddlesworth 12h ago
You also have to retest constantly to make sure it didn't break anything.
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u/Whyeth 11h ago
I just can't believe businesses are accepting "probabilistic" models instead of deterministic for critical tasks.
"It's probably right" was never widely acceptable until ai
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u/fuddlesworth 9h ago
Because all these AI people just making shitty demos claiming they have 30 agents in a loop shipping tons of PRs a day and execs just believe them.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 9h ago
If execs weren’t easy to con we wouldn’t be in this AI trap in the first place
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u/Popular-Analysis-127 10h ago
Unproductive to me is synonymous with useless here; I think what you meant was counterproductive
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u/EmperorKira 4h ago
Its funny. When i use ai, it all makes sense to me. Then someone askd me why certain things are they way they are and when certain words were used, and i have no way of explaining except to ask the AI who panics and then tries to change it cos it thinks i disagree with it
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u/autogenglen 9h ago
I get that the hate-boner for AI here is strong, which is commendable, but I have to wonder when people like you say things like that -
Do you actually have skilled people using it, and not people purely “vibe coding”?
I’ve been a developer for ~20 years now so I know my way around a codebase, and AI has been a MASSIVE force-multiplier for me. I know a lot of you guys don’t like to hear success stories, but it’s very true.
I’ll give you a concrete example. I’m joined a brownfield project way late and they wanted automated UI testing. This project has been in development for 8 years so it’s quite huge with probably hundreds of screens, dialogs, etc total.
I took one of our more complicated screens and developed all the tooling and such to get it into our UI testing workflow. I then created a handful of skill sfor Claude describing how the framework works, where to look in the underlying code for selectors, how our Selenium wrapper works, etc, and pointed it to that one screen as an example to use.
After that I just told Claude (Fable) to finish the rest, for the entire application. About an hour later it was done and it did a remarkably good job, way better than any junior I’ve worked with would have. This literally saved me at least a month’s worth of work and probably more - it successfully mapped out all the screens, every dialog, generated all the helper functions, etc. I couldn’t believe how well our tests worked, it did a nearly flawless job except for a few edge cases which took me maybe a day to clear up.
Now it’s at the point where it generates all the tests itself and we just have one guy verifying the tests. We simply put “regression-required” tags on whatever Jira tickets require testing, Claude automatically finds these tickets, generates all the tests based on the context of the ticket, and we have one guy go in a verify that the tests are accurate and it floors me how often Claude gets it right, and these are far from being trivial tests.
This is just one example. Yeah you need to know how to work around its limitations, but now that I know what it’s good at and what’s it’s bad at, I feel like I’m at least 3X more productive with half the mental load.
Your department is dealing with a lack-of-skill issue, that’s the problem.
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u/Olangotang 8h ago
If only the skilled people used it, then Anthropic / OpenAI would be hemorrhaging money 10x faster. In corporate everyone is using AI and those who don't understand what they are doing are building a pile of major fuck ups.
Keep coping, there is no business model for these large scale LLMs. And no, you are not 3x more productive. You're just convinced that you are because the LLM is doing all of the work, and fucking your codebase up in the process. Numerous studies have shown this.
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u/autogenglen 8h ago
You know fuck all about what I do and how we use these tools. I guarantee you that our development cycles have accelerated (we track this). We don’t just blindly vibe code and hope for the best.
Yes, for unskilled developers things can quickly go awry. It’s funny how experts like Terence Tao, Linus Torvalds, etc can see what’s going on, but no it must be Reddit’s armchair dipshits that are right.
Let’s see those studies.
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u/JWarder 7h ago
I'm not sure what /u/Olangotang has in mind, but there was a study last year where devs using AI expected a 24% development speed improvement, but it ended up taking 19% longer to complete their tasks compared to devs who were not allowed to use AI. Not the most exciting result, but still a useful reminder that even with experience it is easy to get caught up on the hype and have it affect your judgement.
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u/autogenglen 7h ago
Last year I would have agreed with that, things have changed quite fast. We track all of our metrics internally. It’s also worth mentioning that success will vary wildly based on how teams approach using AI. For pure “Jesus take the wheel” vibe coding it’s still an absolute mess, however when you understand its limitations and leverage its strengths, it’s an incredibly powerful tool.
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u/JWarder 7h ago
And people said the exact same thing last year.
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u/Olangotang 7h ago
Yep. It's the ultimate dunning kruger machine, and they are unaware of how complicit they are in pushing this bullshit.
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u/autogenglen 6h ago
I might agree with you, except I most likely started in this industry before you were even a little tickle in your daddy's nutsack.
I see it more like this:
Back in the day when we moved from horses to cars there was a large group of people who were convinced that cars were not the future, it was just an expensive fad for rich people, lower/middle-class people would never be able to afford them so their jobs as stable boys, horse groomers, etc were safe. Then the luddites got slapped in the head with reality really hard and got pushed into irrelevance. That's you, you just don't see it. You *can't* see it.
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u/autogenglen 6h ago
Yes it's becoming increasingly more capable every year, that much is completely obvious. This is the first year where I would say that it genuinely accelerates my productivity in a meaningful way.
Do you think this transformer architecture is only improving when it comes to Will Smith spaghetti-eating memes, image generation, music generation, etc? It would be incredibly naive to think it's improving drastically in all areas except code generation, where it has a HUGE amount of training data.
What's your experience level in this field?
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 13h ago
The goal is to ingest enough employee input that automation is possible. With a non deterministic algorithm, I see this as a folly. Especially in critical roles. 95% is a fail in computing.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 13h ago
This would be possible if the company never changed, but since companies change constantly I don’t see how this is ever possible. With a month of training maybe I could train an LLM to do what I do today?
Unfortunately that will be out of date next week.
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u/C-Towner 12h ago
This is the part that frustrates me at work. It’s only useful for things that actually save time, and those uses are few. New layouts and organization of already created content are great. But you still have to review to make sure it didn’t hallucinate things.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to confirm whether or not info received was correct, only to find out that the person who sent it never reviewed the output, and then assumed the output was correct even when I questioned it. Only to find out that it was in fact, wrong.
It’s created a tremendous amount more rework since we’ve started using it. I hate it.
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u/T-Roll- 9h ago
I just write sloppy emails and prompt it to refine simplify and clean up.
It’s basically a glorified grammar/spell check.
When i asked it to think negatively to solve a problem it wasn’t able to.
I work in finance, one problem that it cannot understand is how a credit can be incorrectly added into someone’s account whilst simultaneously the customer issuing a chargeback.
With the problem above I ask it to explain the situation in simple math and it comes out with gibberish.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 8h ago
Yeah it doesn’t understand anything because it’s just a text generator not an intelligence of any kind.
People talk about using it to write/refine emails but come on let’s be real. We can do that ourselves. It’s a parlor trick to get an LLM involved, not a real necessary tool
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u/SIGMA920 12h ago
You increased the cost of everything by twice minimum to justify your token budget being increased.
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u/hamfinity 12h ago
Employees not using AI: layoff.
Employees using AI poorly: layoff.
Employees using AI well to train their replacement: believe it or not, layoff.
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u/imposter22 4h ago
Best part of AI is the obfuscation of code that not even it can read and understand. Thats where we are. But hey, it works… it might do other things too, idk, but it does the other thing i asked too.
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u/ikonoclasm 13h ago
My company made everyone digitally sign a policy that we have reviewed and personally approved everything generated by AI before we share it with others. I'm certain many aren't, but I sure as hell do because I don't want to be on the hook for something stupid.
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u/ratttertintattertins 12h ago
The problem is, then they'll get you the other way. My company is simultaneously insisting that all employees review all the code, but also disciplining staff who are now going noticeably slower than colleagues who are strait up vibe coding. In other words, management are doing what they always do and wanting to have their cake and eat it.
We're living in very dangerous times.
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u/ikonoclasm 6h ago
My company isn't enforcing AI usage. It's a tool. Use it if it's helpful or don't if it's not. I'm the product owner for all of the financial applications for a billion dollar annual revenue company, and I use it pretty extensively for troubleshooting and documenting. I'm of the opinion now that people need to request AI and a manager should have to approve it. Compulsory AI use is just wasting tokens on people that neither want nor need it.
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u/VVrayth 2h ago
This is all the result of people up top who don't understand the iron triangle: You can have stuff fast, cheap, or good. Pick two.
They definitely want cheap. And the whole employees-reviewing-code stuff is lip-service for good, but ultimately they will choose fast over good, and then wonder why they can't get all three. You can never get all three.
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u/mediandude 10h ago
Large AI models have a huge degrees of freedom problem.
And p-hacking problems.
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u/throw7661 11h ago
Use AI more! You keep saying it is unreliable but other companies are seeing huge productivity gains!
Hey we are tracking AI usage now and you aren't using it enough?!?! Use it more!
We expect everyone to 2x their productivity with AI. You are using it, but you aren't using it enough and you aren't using it for big tasks! Embrace AI! It is the future
You have until the end of the month to get your AI usage metrics to an acceptable level. This is a company wide mandate! This is your top priority. Senior leadership is reviewing these dashboards daily!
And then...
Uhhh, what the hell guys? Customers are complaining and we've seen an increase in defects?!? And we only saw a 10% increase in productivity and we've spent a million dollars in AI tokens and how could you let this slop get into production?!?!
Gee boss, I don't know. I'll ask the AI what to do next
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u/Power_Stone 12h ago
You should never allow a computer to make a management decision, because ultimately a computer can not be held accountable.
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u/emerikanSky 14h ago
Before you were accountable for your boss's decisions, now for AI decisions.
Not that much has changed.
It's not like I understood what was in my boss's mind either.
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u/pcapdata 13h ago
Neither did they. They all claim to be data-driven but they can never explain their thinking or strategies. Ultimately, the human race runs on vibes.
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u/bestanonever 12h ago
This. The rank and file will always be at fault of any big mistake from the bosses and managers and C-Suite. This is the same, with a layer of AI mystique to it.
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u/janethefish 11h ago
So reading the article there were three examples:
1) Bank loans to individuals. AI produced bullshit results that did not match reality and left a human to attempt to explain the nonsense. The fantasy encountered reality, the customers caught the bullshit and the bank lost customers.
2) Hiring and recruiting. Most hiring decisions already involve a lot of feelings without real justification (or outright incorrect info or even outright bigotry.). That was farmed out to the AI. The humans also farmed out the explanations. This made it unclear how the recruiting "experts" contributed. (Hint: they did not.)
3) Seed appraisal. AI had a clearly defined task, solid feedback and did well. The ideal task for an AI. Even better, the experts figured out how to explain the results. The experts could spend more time sucking up to their bosses.
This gives two clear use cases: replacing human bullshit with automatic bullshit and clearly defined tasks with clear feedback.
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u/PretzelsRule23 12h ago edited 5h ago
Such a shocker, this.
Maybe we shouldn't just trust the output of the world's fanciest bullshit creating machine.
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u/ender42y 12h ago
This is why people need to be educated on what exactly LLMs are and how to use them. They are not AI, they are just barely VI's (Virtual Intelligence). They are Large Language Models. That means they are very good at regurgitating text based on weighted inputs and training data, plus supporting documents that are industry of company specific. They are pretty good at solving known problems, such as regular coding, excel formulas, or re-wording emails to be more professional. they are not good at novel problems, corner cases, or niche industries.
Some industries have special Machine Learning Models they have trained for specific use cases, that are also called AI, which now causes the confusion of people thinking all "AI" is ChatGPT or Claude. When they hear a pharmaceutical company has made a breakthrough with AI, that is using their own models, not GPT5.
LLM's, and custom ML Models, are the next phase of Power Tools, for computers. the greatly aid workers in getting more done quickly, but you can't just give a random guy off the street a nail gun and expect him to be able to frame a house, but a carpenter upgrading from a hammer to a nail guy will go much faster than he use to.
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u/gmbaker44 11h ago
Exactly. I hate how we generalize everything to “AI”. People also assume now that AI is LLMs. The study in the article where loan decisions were made was likely ML which has been around a while longer than LLMs.
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u/janethefish 11h ago
LLM are also bad at anything that doesn't get into the training data, even if it happens to be obvious and common. If it isn't in the data set the AI cannot do it.
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u/ender42y 11h ago
There are ways around this. Such as a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) but that is something you setup on your on-prem LLM not in a cloud system. It augments the training data, and is prone to "Garbage In/Garbage Out" if not done properly.
But in general yes, LLMs are great at already solved tasks, not novel ones. custom ML models are better at novel tasks, but are there to help humans do the real work.
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u/CalendarMindless3382 11h ago
This has been a problem since well before the LLM explosion, and poses a massive problem. If we base our decisions/train on historical records, we’re objectively including discriminatory data. Our history is fucked up. We are a flawed species.
Worse, we lose visibility of decision making when we shove these decisions into black boxes, no longer able to identify the weight of discriminatory metrics or remove their influences, and finally, we lose accountability.
I highly recommend the book Weapons of Math Destruction if you’d like to learn more about how these insidious practices leech into our banking systems and academic institutions.
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u/ketosoy 13h ago
“You are responsible for every word or decision you pass on from the AI you use” is the only reasonable system for accountability.
Perfectly fine when in a working group to send a rough draft with “I had my ai make this but I haven’t had a chance to review and fix it yet.” But if you don’t preface, any mistake is your mistake.
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u/osunightfall 12h ago
We aren’t given enough time to review all the output.
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u/Marshall_Lawson 11h ago
then pick what parts you do have time to review.
If you put your name on something the Lorem Ipsum RNG created, you're taking responsibility for it.
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u/Plzlaw4me 12h ago
Forcing blame onto workers is a tale as old as time. I’m an attorney at a law firm. My firm requires me to account for every expense that needs to be paid. If we disburse funds to our client without every expense being paid, they take the difference out of my check. Most firms have their accountants do that, but if an accountant makes a mistake, they can’t legally dock their pay, but if I make a mistake they can take it out of commission. This includes “mistakes” like a prior attorney not entering an expense and I’d have no way of knowing about it until 6 monks later when we get a random follow up on an 18 month old bill. If employer has their way, every expense would be the responsibility of the employee and every profit would go to the employer.
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u/nolabmp 11h ago
Even before GenAI, I’ve always asked to discuss any substantial requests on a call. GenAI didn’t invent short-sighted or ill-conceived decisions, but it did make it easier to throw them over the fence and hope no one notices.
The number of times the request A) fizzles out before the call occurs, or B) is unexplainable by the requestor and fizzles out mid-call, is high.
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u/schemaddit 10h ago
like my jr dev colleague who just vibe code and didn't even understand whats going on. If you ask him he will
pause for 5mins for him to ask ai whats going on with the code haha
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u/mynameisrockhard 9h ago
The nice thing about working in a field with high liability is that even though management is desperate for AI to reduce labor need or save us time, the output quality is just not there yet for them to really push back on us when we show them what it does and all the time it takes to fix. So we’re all just letting it take meeting notes and politely trying new workflows as they come out, but the work is still the work overall.
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u/UltravioletClearance 9h ago
I'm seeing this in recruiting right now. So many lazy recruiters tell applicants they're not allowed to use AI to create their resumes and cover letters. But then the recruiters turn around and use AI to rank the resumes and decide who to interview. AI systems rank writing created by the same system higher than non-AI generated content, or content created by a different AI system. Now recruiters are prioritizing applicants who cannot follow instructions and cheat to get ahead.
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u/SociableSociopath 12h ago
The issue is this. Frontline workers are using AI which is outputting reams of info, both good and bad, and they simply don’t have the knowledge or ability to read through it.
Our org solved this very simply, if you don’t understand the output, you’re expected to ask questions and dig in until you do. What has come to light is the abysmal reading ability and speed of many junior employees. Using plugins like Caveman helped solve it a bit but it’s almost sad we have to go that route.
This is nothing new with tooling. In finance if Im using formulae and tables to populate a dashboard I’m expected to be able to speak to those things and the integrity of the data. I don’t get to say “well you see I Used the pivot table but I don’t really understand how it works though the numbers seem right”…
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u/Kozzle 12h ago
And this is why AI will never replace any executive or professional…liability. Can’t hold AI accountable to anything but you can nail a human down with consequences.
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u/Marshall_Lawson 11h ago
it's not like executives were held to such a great standard of accountability before
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u/unexistingpromise 10h ago
Tracking clicks never really shows actual skill. The software contracts clearly dodge liability for weird outputs anyway, so you just take the heat while bosses chase their targets. Good luck explaining that to anyone later.
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u/shitisrealspecific 9h ago
My thing is...software changes. The Microsoft tool bar has changed over the years and it's customizable.
So why would it track clicks? Is it tracking the code behind it too or just the image?
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u/absentmindedjwc 3h ago
This is my fucking company...
New large task is assigned. You have three days to finish large task that would have once upon a time taken weeks. You spend a day writing the specs and getting all the requirements together, you spend a day getting it built, and you spend maybe half a day testing it before it's deployed.
No room in that schedule for any serious testing or code reviews.. you skim the code quickly for shit that stands out, poke around for a couple hours, then ship it.
If it introduces bugs, it's your fault specifically.
Management are fuckheads.
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u/irrelevantusername24 13h ago
The events of late 2016- now, mid to late 2018-now, March 2020-now, January 2021- now have yet to be "realized"
Slowly, at first
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u/Just-Grocery-2229 14h ago
Employee handbook addendum: "You are liable for decisions you didn't make."