Lawmakers Debate AI’s Expanding Role in the Workplace

The House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions met on February 3 to examine how artificial intelligence is being adopted at work and what an “AI-ready America” should look like for employers and workers alike.

The hearing, titled “Building an AI-Ready America: Adopting AI at Work,” focused on workforce readiness, innovation, data gaps, and the guardrails needed to ensure AI strengthens productivity without eroding worker trust or rights.

Subcommittee Chairman Rick Allen, R-Ga., opened the hearing by framing AI as both an opportunity and a responsibility for employers. “While technology can make our workplaces better, trust and transparency always benefit the workplace,” Allen said. “Employers protect rights, strengthen morale, and build trust when they communicate openly about how AI is deployed in the workplace. That trust is essential for a competitive workforce and strengthens ties between workers and job creators.”

The theme of transparency as a prerequisite for trust echoed throughout the hearing, offering a clear signal to HR professionals navigating AI adoption inside their organizations.

AI’s Impact in the Workplace: Tasks vs. Jobs

Several witnesses emphasized that AI is not eliminating entire occupations so much as reshaping the tasks within them — a distinction with major implications for workforce planning and skills strategy.

Revana Sharfuddin, a labor economist and research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, explained that AI differs from earlier waves of automation that replaced whole job categories. “AI is already changing how work is done in the United States, but in uneven, task-specific ways that our current data struggle to capture,” she said.

Sharfuddin noted that while AI can outperform humans at specific tasks, it cannot replace the full scope of most jobs. “Across 950 occupations, although AI could perform certain tasks in nearly all jobs, there was no occupation that AI could fully handle alone,” she said, citing research by Stanford economists.

The problem, she argued, is that federal workforce data systems are not designed to measure these task-level changes. “Our labor statistics count jobs, not what people do within them,” Sharfuddin said, adding that the Current Population Survey includes no questions about AI use or how it changes daily work.

For HR professionals, this highlights a growing gap between how work is evolving internally and how it is measured externally — increasing the importance of internal skills mapping, job redesign, and workforce analytics.

Innovation as a Guidepost and Regulation as a Guardrail

Witness testimonies revealed differing views on whether AI adoption requires new workplace laws or better enforcement of existing ones.

Bradford Kelley, a shareholder at Littler Mendelson, P.C., cautioned against moving too quickly to create AI-specific regulation. “The United States already has a well-established, technology-neutral legal framework fully capable of addressing most AI-related misconduct,” Kelley said.

He argued that many commonly raised concerns are already illegal under current law. “If you’re using artificial intelligence to screen applicants on the basis of race, sex or disability — those violate existing laws,” Kelley said. “We need to put the focus on existing laws.”

Worker Protections and Algorithmic Management

Other witnesses stressed that AI-related workplace harms are not theoretical, and that HR must take them seriously.

Tanya Goldman, a fellow with Workshop, a federal worker advocacy group, testified that employers are already using AI to make decisions about wages, scheduling, hiring, and performance. “These systems often lack transparency, so workers do not understand how decisions affecting their livelihoods are being made,” Goldman said.

She also raised concerns about algorithmic management and workplace surveillance. “This technology allows employers to surveil workers in more exacting ways than a human boss ever could,” Goldman said, noting that automated systems can pressure employees to work at unsafe speeds or penalize workers who need breaks due to pregnancy or disability.

“These harms are the product of choices, not an inevitability,” she added, arguing that employers and policymakers have a role to play in shaping how AI is designed and deployed.

What This Means for HR Professionals

Taken together, the hearing underscored several realities HR leaders are already navigating:

• AI is a workforce issue, not just a technology issue. As Walton noted, AI is being deployed “across every function,” placing HR at the center of governance and implementation decisions.
• Transparency builds trust. As Chairman Allen emphasized, trust depends on “communicat[ing] openly about how AI is deployed in the workplace.”
• Skills strategies matter more than job titles. Sharfuddin’s testimony highlighted how task-level change is redefining work faster than traditional classifications can keep up.
• Human oversight remains essential. Even proponents of rapid AI adoption stressed that people must remain involved in high-stakes employment decisions.

SHRM supports AI regulations that support workplace and workforce innovation to implement a balanced approach that safeguards job candidates and employees’ rights while enabling businesses to use tools that will lead to better workforce decisions.