While AI systems hold the promise of unlocking human capabilities at an unprecedented scale, report after report has highlighted the outcries of AI being biased, unfair, with lack of transparency and accountability, and producing an unsustainably large carbon footprint.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, systems were being used to analyze footage from security cameras in workplace to detect when employees are not complying with social distancing rules; while there is a handful of good intentions behind such a technology, the very same technology could be used for tracking employees' movements, or time away from desk. As we move towards a future likely ruled by big data and powerful AI algorithms, important questions arise relating to the psychological impacts of surveillance, data governance, leadership and organizational culture, and compliance with ethical and moral concerns.

The historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari argued that digital platforms such as those that allow us to work from remote need to follow three basic rules to protect us from digital dictatorships. First, any data collection on people should be used to help people rather than to manipulate, control, or harm them. In the meetings context, this translates into providing analytics that help employees reflect on their experience rather than causing them to receive low performance review in the event of a meeting not being executed well. Second, surveillance must always go both ways. That is, whenever an organization increases surveillance of individuals, at the same time, organizational accountability needs to increase. If organizations could establish processes to monitor their workforce, they may well establish processes to audit their own actions as well. Third, data should not be concentrated in a single entity, not least because data monopolies are the recipe for dictatorship. In the workplace context, this translates into newly created divisions in a company that oversee data collection and, ideally, ensure that data about their workers is in the hands of the workers themselves.