The Employer’s Wage and Hour Advisor

On May 16, 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) reminded employers that they must remain in compliance with federal labor standards as employers adopt artificial intelligence or other automated systems to streamline Human Resources functions in the workplace. The DOL outlined several artificial intelligence guidelines (“AI Guidelines”) to provide employers that create and deploy artificial intelligence (“AI”) with guidance for designing and implementing these emerging technologies in ways that enhance job quality and protect workers’ rights.

While the advent of artificial intelligence tools that produce large volumes of written, audiovisual, and graphic content may be a boon for many businesses, it also could dramatically change the landscape of wage and hour practices, including how the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) applies to U.S. workers. Among other things, large language models (LLMs) (a form of AI that is “trained” on volumes of data to effectively create certain kinds of output) could readily be used for a variety of office functions – fundamentally changing how office work is performed in the very near future. Previously, businesses have incrementally adopted AI for specific tasks, such as screening resumes or identifying key attributes in large volumes of documents. However, as AI progresses, it is posed to apply to a much broader swath of office and other work.