There’s a chatbot for HR to log discrimination complaints. But, would you use it?

If you’re scratching your heads on this one, Grasia Hald‘s post at Medium, “Chatbot 101: Everything you ever wanted to know about Chatbots” may help.

Here’s a snippet:

A chatbot is a software system, which can interact or “chat” with a human user in natural language (such as English, or whatever the chatbot has been built on). Chatbots can help inform a user, or help them with fulfilling a task.

“Oh, that chatbot,” said some of you.

With the table properly set, here’s more from Megan Rose Dickey at Techcrunch (here) about Spot, the chatbot that lets employees document and report harassment and discrimination to HR:

This version enables HR departments to manage and track anonymous reports of harassment and discrimination, and follow up on those reports.

Spot  relies on memory science and artificial intelligence to address harassment and discrimination at work. Using the chatbot, employees can anonymously document inappropriate behavior, the ability for HR workers to follow-up, the ability to export reports as signed, time-stamped PDFs and more. Employees can, of course, choose to use their name if they’d like.

Now, I could go on for another 3,000 words about the pros and cons of a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence versus actual human interaction for intake of discrimination complaints. But, instead, I want to turn this over to you.

What do you think? Would you use this as a complement to your existing harassment complaint procedure? Do you think that your employees would rather report discrimination to a machine than you? Why or why not?

Email me, because you know I’d love to hear from you.