The social partners in the MET industry underlined the creative potential of AI, not only replacing repetitive or dangerous tasks but also creating new jobs and enabling work on more creative tasks. Moreover, good management of AI can contribute to a positive working environment, especially concerning psychosocial risks.

At the same time, a negative aspect of workers, such as reduced autonomy and deskilling, should be considered. 

Underlining the importance of human-centric AI in the workplace, social partners agreed that AI applications should not merely substitute human labour and industrial know-how or increase work intensity.

The joint conclusions address the following main areas:

- Occupational Safety and Health: they agreed that AI could contribute to a positive working environment but also create new risks related to human-machine collaboration in a shared work environment, stressing the importance of a risk analysis and consultation with social partners;

- Human resource management: according to the social partners, a key aspect is that data-driven management decisions should be subject to human control.

- Data and data protection: AI is data-intensive, and the data usage must be lawful, fair, and transparent in line with GDPR principles;

- Skills: continuous learning is crucial to keep up workers with technological developments to understand the purpose of the AI system.

The parties confirmed the critical role of social dialogue to address all employment-related aspects of technology, including inequality, skills, the nature of work, work organisation, and the prevention of discrimination, aiming for excellent cooperation at the company level in the introduction and design of new systems in the workplace that successfully implements such a significant technological change. 

Ceemet and industriAll Europe encourage “early consultation of workers and, where appropriate, their representatives in the decision-making process concerning the introduction of new AI systems, including the design, preparation of specifications for all stakeholders, development, and deployment of the system. This will undoubtedly increase confidence in the technology and help workers to fully exploit the capabilities of the technology”.