How Workplace AI Is Both A Lifeline And A Landmine For Disabled Employees

Forbes

a day ago

In 2025, artificial intelligence is transforming the workplace for everyone, regardless of ability, but for workers with disabilities, the critical stakes governing both threats and opportunities remain, as ever, unique and highly personalized.
First, the good news.
AI has the potential to transform working life for disabled staff in several important ways. The core promise is enhanced accessibility. Though not yet at a level where it can operate entirely independently from human oversight, AI holds the potential to remediate on an industrial scale vast swathes of material that are inaccessible to workers with disabilities. This might include websites and documents that were previously indecipherable to screen readers or videos that lack captions for the hard of hearing.
Those with sensory processing differences arising from neurodiversity and dyslexia can use AI to create highly personalized content such as concise, easy-read summaries or customized fonts, spacing, and colors.
Though this is an opportunity that exists across the board, not just for employees with disabilities, new technologies such as agentic AI, which is now being rolled into everyday platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT, are fostering an important workplace skills reset. In short, over the next few years, employees with the highest level of proficiency in deploying AI tools stand to gain the most. Why this might matter to employees with disabilities is that such individuals are often natural productivity hackers. Innovating through devising shortcuts and alternatives is often a key requirement of life with a disability, as is an appetite for identifying and becoming early adopters of technologies with the potential to make life that bit easier.
Being watched
Sadly, on the flipside, there is a much darker side to workplace AI for people with disabilities. This can be seen in the disproportionate impact that the growing proliferation of productivity surveillance tools has on this population.
Undoubtedly buoyed by a wave of post-pandemic return-to-office mandates, including a directive from U.S. President Donald Trump for federal employees to cease working from home shortly after he returned to office, the workplace surveillance market is expected to grow to $4.5 billion by 2026.
Algorithmic and AI-based workplace tracking tools can include anything from keystroke and mouse movement monitors to video monitoring software that can not only provide snapshots of an employee's computer screen but also a live video feed of the person at their desk. Additionally, some tools can track a person's exact location in the office, and there are those that measure physical output in environments such as warehouses.
Nowadays, this type of tech has become so pervasive that it can also monitor a worker's bodily functions directly through health and well-being apps that are offered by the employer, often within a wrapper of employee benefit packages.
Such technologies are not on the periphery either but are now, under the guise of employers needing to make data-driven decisions to boost both profits and employee productivity, being deployed by many renowned brands such as PWC, UnitedHealth Group and Elon Musk's AI startup xAI.
Although many employees may somewhat justifiably have concerns, a 2023 Pew Research study found that 56 percent of U.S. workers are against the use of AI tools that track employee location, while 61 percent oppose monitoring employees' movements. However, it is potentially those workers with disabilities who have the most to lose.
That's because the data that has been used to build the tools themselves uses metrics such as the typical output that might be expected of a non-disabled worker. These might include aspects like how many bathroom breaks an employee might have throughout the day. How long an individual should be able to remain seated at their desk for a single session could be another criterion. Unfortunately, workers with disabilities often fall outside of these 'norms' and therefore risk being flagged by AI systems for indiscipline or review by senior management.
Writing for the American Bar Association last month, Ariana Aboulafia, Project Lead, Disability Rights in Technology Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, posited, 'Worker surveillance issues are inextricably tied to disability rights. These tools are often used in many different employment contexts and to the detriment of the privacy and civil rights of workers. Even though they seem like something out of dystopian fiction, they may very well be used by your employer right now or by your next employer. It is vital that workers are aware of the potential presence of these tools and that employers are aware of their impacts so that they can mitigate harms—or even choose not to use these tools at all.'
Common sense might dictate that something as simple as disability disclosure from the employee might be the way out of this trap. That way, the employer would be able to take the disability into account when considering the surveillance metrics. The reality is, however, in today's competitive workplace, if an employee has the option of not revealing their disability status to their employer, they may well be inclined to remain tight-lipped for a whole host of reasons. Not least a fear of discrimination and negative attitudes from management and colleagues. Equally, in 2025, it's no longer far-fetched to believe that individuals of all abilities are becoming increasingly fearful that agentic AI may be set to take their jobs in the near future and will therefore do everything they can to avoid being perceived as risky or less valuable to the organization.
In this context, it would seem like workplace AI surveillance is here to stay, with the next best option being to build as robust a framework as possible for how to use the tools responsibly and to recognize the types of cases where they might not be telling the employer the whole story.