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“Today Lattice is making AI history,” CEO Sarah Franklin wrote in a July 9th blog post. “We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access, and even a manager. Just as any person would be.”
On July 12th, after a very predictable backlash, Lattice posted an update saying it “will not further pursue digital workers in the product.”
Here’s a sample of the responses to Lattice’s original announcement:
- “I have questions,” Hebba Youssef, chief people officer at Workweek, said on LinkedIn. “My biggest one: why??”
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- “Based on my experience in and around AI and HR, it appears to me that we’ve skipped several steps,” HR professional Amanda Halle said in another LinkedIn post.
- “This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company,” said Sawyer Middeleer, chief of staff at Aomni, in a comment to a post from Franklin on LinkedIn.
Franklin’s original post did acknowledge that there are questions about what it means to integrate an AI worker into processes for managing real people. And Franklin has posted comments on LinkedIn to explain Lattice’s thinking about the feature. “I’m not advocating for the personification of AI,” Franklin said in one.
There are many companies exploring the idea of digital workers — Franklin’s blog post pointed to Cognition AI’s Devin software engineer and Qualified’s Piper AI sales representative. It appears Lattice was trying to respond to these sorts of AI bots, but its attempt backfired, especially among the people who might care about it the most.
Lattice didn’t reply to a request for comment.
