Kamin: AI for HR Equals Bad Injury Reporting

Friday, June 20, 2025 | 0

An emergent new trend of using artificial intelligence to replace human resources employees could pose problems for workers’ compensation defendants tasked with confirming whether or not any injuries occurred on the job.

John P. Kamin

Human resources is one of the fastest-growing job sectors in the United States, according to SHRM. However, as Slate pointed out in a rather depressing piece, a new trend of AI chatbots is quickly replacing the humans in human resources. While Slate mostly focused on the use of AI bots during the job interview process, it’s hard to ignore this paragraph and its implications for other people in HR:

The shift to AI among human resources sectors is real. Earlier this month, the CEO of IBM confirmed that the company had laid off “a couple hundred” HR workers and replaced them with AI agents. A recent survey of 500 HR professionals also found that almost three-quarters of them believe they’re adopting the technology more quickly than other departments. Despite this, HR remains among the fastest-growing sectors in the U.S., with the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting an 8% growth by 2033. According to the HR Digest magazine, although AI can be used in this field to automate “an unnecessary amount of manual work,” like payroll management and vacation requests, it can’t yet “oversee the human section” or company culture.

For those who investigate allegations of work-related injuries, it’s an unsettling, to say the least, to anticipate a future where the HR department at defendant employers is now a team of bots. I cannot anticipate a future where an applicant would testify at a deposition, “Yes, I told the bot that I injured my knee at work. It asked if I would like to see a doctor, gave me a DWC1 form, and sent me to the industrial clinic.”

Instead, that testimony is more likely to be, “Well, I tried to tell the bot that I injured my knee at work, but it didn’t work (i.e., didn’t allow me to tell it what the problem was) and
didn’t offer me a DWC1 form or medical care.”

Regardless of whether the testimony in this second hypothetical scenario is true, exaggerated or an outright lie, how is a defense attorney supposed to call a bot as a witness?

To play devil’s advocate, it is possible that there could be some electronic record of such an interaction, but it would probably not have the complexity, credibility and reliability of human witness testimony.

Then there’s the more practical side of where workers’ compensation professionals interact with HR. For instance, it’s common for adjusters and attorneys to email HR professionals to inquire about injury reporting, witness availability, missed work, work restrictions, wages/earnings, use of temporary workers and other day-to-day details.

Relying on my background as a tech support analyst, AI software is probably not going to be savvy enough to know to trust the workers’ compensation carrier’s adjuster or defense attorney. My cynical view is that it will be limited to whoever has permission to access it, and outsiders such as defense attorneys and adjusters will not be granted permission for security reasons.

At the end of the day, workers’ compensation practitioners prefer to be able to talk to the humans in human resources, look them in the eye and ask questions about a very human thing: Was another human injured at work? Could there have been an injury report that was forgotten about by a supervisor? Did human error occur along the way? Are there other human insights into the case, such as a history of disciplinary actions or unusual behavior, that would give us defenses against the claim?

This level of complexity is probably not needed for an accepted specific date of injury to a single body part. But when it comes to psych cases with complex defenses, such as the good faith personnel action defense, this type of human insight is worth the entire claim itself.

Conclusion

Innovation is going to happen, and we at the Law Offices of Bradford and Barthel have been embracing technology ever since we were one of the first firms to use cloud-based computing. That being said, we need to keep the humans in human resources for a plethora of reasons, with injury reporting being perhaps one of the most relevant.

John P. Kamin is a workers’ compensation defense attorney and partner at Bradford & Barthel’s Woodland Hills location. He is WorkCompCentral's former legal editor. This entry from Bradford & Barthel's blog appears with permission.