California becomes first US state to demand a human inside AI employment decisions
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The News
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the No Robo Bosses Act (SB 947) this week, the first law of its kind in the US. From 1 July 2027, employers may not rely solely on an automated decision system to discipline or terminate a worker; a human must corroborate the system’s output against the underlying data, and workers must be told when AI was used in a decision affecting them. The law also bars systems that predict future performance from personal data and gives workers the right to request a year of the data used in a disciplinary or termination call. Violations carry a $500 civil penalty per incident, CIO reported.Why It Matters
The law targets discipline and termination, not hiring — but the compliance architecture it demands is the same one TA teams are being asked to build for AI screening and interviewing. It sets the template other states will copy, and its corroboration standard — a human must examine the evidence, not merely sign off the machine’s conclusion — is exactly the test regulators and plaintiffs’ lawyers will apply to AI hiring tools. If your automated decision can’t show its inputs, it can’t be corroborated, which makes it close to unusable for consequential calls.Taking Action
All action is situated in your corporate context. These are starting points, not prescriptions — choose what fits.
Connect
Who to talk with in your enterprise
Your employment counsel — map any AI or “bossware” that touches discipline, termination or performance-prediction in the states where you operate. Your people operations or HRIS lead — start an inventory of which tools score, rank or flag workers; the law’s drafters note hundreds of such products exist and many employers don’t know which ones their managers use.Inspect
What to take a closer look at
Audit whether your AI hiring or evaluation tools expose their inputs. The corroboration standard is unmeetable if a vendor can’t show the data behind an output — check contracts for a right to the underlying inputs and logs, not just the recommendation.Reflect
What to think about more deeply
“No Robo Bosses” is, despite the name, a law that keeps robots in the room — it merely insists a human reads the evidence before anyone is sacked. If that feels like a low bar, it is worth asking what the software was doing before.