"When AI eats the manager: Fairwork United States ratings 2025,"

Algorithmic management is fundamental to digital labour platforms and platform work across the globe. AI-powered tools for hiring, scheduling, paying, managing, and surveilling work and workers are the heart of the on-demand service industry...

The new algorithmic management technologies have direct implications for operational cost-cutting, efficiency metrics across the supply chains, and measurable KPIs (key performance indicators). This hyper-quantification of work can expedite decision-making, scaling, and meeting the performance indicators set by investors and funders. However, the implications for work that has been re-structured and re-imagined through these technologies are far reaching for workers, consumers, and societies. Automated technologies are displacing traditional management relationships, transparency, and accountability in the workplace. The data that platform workers produce may shape how platform companies set prices, manage workers, create personalised pay structures, and even offset financial liabilities.1 Indeed, one company named Argyle has amassed the employment records of 40 million platform workers in the US, and sells this data as its primary source of profits.2 The reality of working with AI is different from the promises associated with it. AI is, to put it descriptively, eating the managers...

...For 11 platforms in ride-hailing, food delivery, elder care, and healthcare, Fairwork considers how new management technologies replace, if at all, management roles formerly occupied by humans, even in sectors where human supervision is crucial for preventing harms and for creating safe environments for both workers and consumers/ clients.3 While managers might be sidelined in the platform economy, new institutions have joined the scene. This report highlights some of the new relationships undertaken by US platforms as well as the intensifying efforts of those same platforms to exempt themselves from existing governmental oversight and labour regulations.

While Fairwork recognises that automation, AI-based tools, and algorithmic management systems can introduce efficiencies to the work process, the immediate and longterm consequences of these technologies on workers must be made visible and, if necessary, mediated...