Almost every conversation about AI and work assumes your employees are on the receiving end of your decisions: leadership decides, the organisation adapts, and the only question is how kindly you manage it. In much of Europe that assumption is simply false.

In Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France, Spain and across the Nordics, employees are not the subject of the decision. Through their representatives they are a party to it, by law. Germany's Works Constitution Act gives a works council co-determination over "the introduction and use of technical devices designed to monitor the behaviour or performance of employees," and the Federal Labour Court reads that to cover systems merely capable of monitoring, not only those intended to. Most enterprise AI tools qualify almost incidentally. Where co-determination applies, a rollout done witho ...