I was recently speaking to an HR team at a UK company who had a problem. An employee had raised a formal grievance about their treatment at work. Nothing particularly unusual about that, except the complaint was an enormous document running into dozens of pages, full of legal arguments, references to employment legislation and detailed allegations against the employer.
It was, of course, generated by AI.
"Can we just ignore these things if they're obviously written by ChatGPT?" was the question.
Alas, you cannot.
Whether that grievance has been prepared by a solicitor charging £300 an hour or generated for free by ChatGPT, the employer still needs to take the allegations seriously, investigate them appropriately and follow a fair process.
And therein lies a growing problem for HR teams.
Every employee now has a lawyer in their pocket.
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Raising a formal grievance against your employer is a pretty big deal. By the time someone reaches that stage, there's a reasonable chance the relationship between employee and employer has already started to break down.
For employees, it's also intimidating. Your average worker won't have much knowledge of employment law, the Equality Act or what constitutes a fair disciplinary process. They might be convinced their manager has treated them badly but have little idea whether anything unlawful has actually happened.
Historically, getting professional advice would have been expensive. Senior executives facing dismissal might instruct an employment solicitor and spend thousands of pounds fighting their corner. But what about a 19-year-old working in a supermarket who believes they've been unfairly dismissed? Or a care worker who thinks their holiday pay is wrong?
Most people aren't going to spend hundreds of pounds on legal advice to pursue a relatively modest employment dispute.
Enter ChatGPT, Claude and the new generation of AI Assistants.
You can now type something as simple as "My manager has been bullying me at work. What can I do?" and receive a detailed response explaining your potential rights, relevant legislation and steps you could take.
Go further and ask AI to draft a formal grievance, incorporate the relevant employment legislation and explain what your employer might have done wrong.
A few minutes later, you've got something that looks remarkably professional.
Is it all legally correct? Not necessarily. AI can misinterpret legislation or even invent supporting case law. But it can give an employee the confidence and knowledge to pursue a complaint they might otherwise have abandoned.
That changes the dynamics of employee relations quite considerably.
The obvious concern is that AI makes it easier for employees to raise grievances. Does that mean more complaints?
Anecdotally, the early signs suggest the answer is yes. We've been hearing from HR teams experiencing rising volumes of grievances, sometimes to the point of needing additional resources to cope. It's too early to say how much of that increase is directly attributable to AI, but it's a trend worth watching.
Then there's the length and complexity of the complaints themselves.
We've heard from organisations receiving AI-generated grievances running up to 30 pages. Often these concern issues that might previously have been raised in a fairly straightforward two-page letter.
Now HR has to work through pages of allegations, identify the relevant facts, examine legal arguments and determine what needs investigating.
But the problem isn't simply the number of pages.
AI is also helping employees understand what they might be entitled to ask for. An employee who previously complained about their working conditions might now raise specific questions about contractual obligations, discrimination, disability-related reasonable adjustments or breaches of company policy.
These aren't necessarily trivial matters. An employee asking for reasonable adjustments to working patterns or accessibility provisions may be raising legitimate issues that are difficult and expensive for an employer to resolve.
AI might even help employees identify problems that their employer should have addressed years ago.
The challenge for HR is distinguishing genuine employment obligations from arguments that sound legally impressive but have little merit, whilst ensuring nothing important gets overlooked.
Imagine grievance volumes increasing by 30% or 50%, with each complaint more detailed and potentially more demanding than before. Even a well-resourced HR team would struggle to absorb that without changing the way it works.
The timing of this emerging challenge is particularly unfortunate for UK employers.
The Equality Act 2010 already provides important protections against discrimination and harassment without requiring two years' service. But ordinary unfair dismissal has historically been quite different.
In the UK, employees have generally needed two years of continuous service before qualifying for ordinary unfair dismissal protection.
That is about to change.
Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, the qualifying period falls from two years to just six months on 1 January 2027.
That's a huge change, particularly for industries like healthcare, retail and hospitality employing large numbers of relatively young workers, part-time employees and people who move regularly between jobs.
The result? Many more employees will qualify for unfair dismissal protection much earlier in their employment, while employers face greater potential exposure when they get things wrong.
Combine that with AI making employment rights more accessible and you’ve got a cocktail that’s more potent than my Friday night negroni.
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There's an important positive side to all this.
As an employer myself, I don't think businesses should be frightened of employees understanding their rights. In fact, if you're genuinely trying to treat your workers fairly, following proper processes and doing the right thing, you should welcome it.
Sadly, there are some employers who could do with being challenged a little more often.
I know of a case involving a young employee at a very well-known UK business who was abruptly dismissed shortly before completing two years' service in a zero hours contract, despite having performed well in the role. The business had a practice of terminating employees before they reached the two-year threshold. Managers had a handbook expressly telling them to do this and were also given guidance that they could rehire good performing individuals after a few weeks.
It wasn’t stated overtly but it was clearly a policy put in place to avoid the protections afforded by unfair dismissal legislation.
I've spent much of my career employing people, including young graduates who joined us with little experience. One of the most rewarding parts of running a business is seeing those people develop their skills, gain confidence and progress into senior positions.
The idea of deliberately dismissing good employees just before they acquire additional employment rights is, frankly, outrageous. If AI helps an inexperienced worker understand that they've been treated unfairly, and gives them the confidence to challenge that treatment, I'm all for it.
However, there's a flip side.
The HR professionals who ultimately deal with these complaints aren't necessarily the people responsible for the poor practices in the first place. They're the ones who have to investigate, gather evidence, manage the grievance process and potentially prepare a defence for an employment tribunal.
Even where an employer has a strong case, the cost and disruption of defending a claim can make settling an attractive option.
Good employers still need good processes. Those processes are about to come under greater scrutiny.
This raises an interesting question. If employees are using AI to construct their grievances, should HR use AI to help investigate them?
What if the AI summarises a 20-page grievance but misses a critical allegation that eventually becomes central to an employment tribunal claim?
A fair concern but consider the alternative.
You've got an HR professional working through their fifth lengthy grievance of the week, reading page after page of legal arguments, witness accounts and employment history.
How confident are you that they won't miss something important?
We shouldn't assume that humans are infallible simply because they're reading the documents themselves. In my view, a properly designed AI Assistant working alongside an HR professional will reduce the risk of important details being overlooked.
The important bit is alongside.
AI should be able to identify allegations, highlight potential legal risks, extract dates and events, identify gaps in evidence and point the case handler back to the relevant sections of the original documents.
The HR professional must still verify the findings, apply critical thinking and make decisions, which can sometimes be subjective. AI doesn't remove the need for professional judgement or, when necessary, specialist legal advice.
I'd much rather have an experienced HR professional supported by technology that's checked the documentation than expect them to do everything manually.
Much of the discussion about AI in HR focuses on improving efficiency. Faster employee support, reduced administration, automated processes and freeing up HR professionals to focus on more valuable work.
But there's a flip side that doesn't get nearly as much attention: what happens when AI makes the people you serve more productive?
If employees can now prepare sophisticated grievances in minutes, HR needs the tools to manage that incoming workload without compromising the quality or fairness of the process.
Imagine receiving a 20-page grievance alleging bullying, unfair treatment and breaches of company policy.
Your first instinct might be to upload it into ChatGPT and ask for a summary. And why not? It will probably do a pretty good job, highlighting the key allegations, potential legal risks and areas requiring investigation.
Of course, you'd want to be careful about uploading sensitive employee information into a public AI tool. However, enterprise offerings like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise and Claude Enterprise can offer appropriate data privacy and security controls.
So why invest in a specialist HR Service Delivery platform when you could simply give your Employee Relations team access to one of these tools?
Because summarising a grievance isn't the same as managing one.
Think about everything that happens after that initial complaint arrives.
You need to understand the employee's history, their employment details and any previous related cases. You need access to your internal HR policies, grievance procedures and investigation guidelines. You may need to involve managers, HR Business Partners, witnesses and eventually your legal team.
Then there's the actual investigation. Who needs interviewing? What questions should you ask? What evidence is missing? What are the deadlines? Has the employee received the appropriate correspondence? Has someone remembered to schedule the appeal?
A clever AI-generated summary is useful, but it's only the beginning.
This is where we've been investing heavily in Applaud's AI-powered HR Service Delivery platform.
Rather than AI sitting alongside your HR systems, we've embedded it directly into the case management process, with access to relevant internal HR knowledge, policies, employee information and case history, subject to the appropriate permissions.
When that 20-page grievance arrives, AI can analyse the allegations, highlight potential risks, identify gaps in evidence and suggest questions for the investigator. Crucially, those suggestions can be grounded in your organisation's own HR policies and procedures rather than relying solely on general information from the internet.
From there, Applaud can help create a structured case plan with investigation tasks, responsibilities and deadlines. Reminders and notifications keep things moving, whilst collaborators can work together on the same case with appropriate access controls.
As the investigation progresses, AI remains available to help summarise interviews, review new evidence, draft correspondence and advise on possible next steps. All the documents, conversations, tasks and decisions remain together in the case record.
And if the grievance eventually becomes a legal dispute? You can export the case history and supporting documents into an organised bundle for your legal team. No frantic searching through email inboxes, shared drives and Word documents trying to reconstruct what happened six months ago.
Naturally, AI isn't replacing the HR professional or the employment solicitor. Its suggestions need checking and important decisions still require human judgement.
The real value isn't having AI answer a question about a grievance. It's having AI help you manage the entire grievance process.
We're only beginning to see the effects of AI on employee relations. As employees become more AI-literate and the tools become more capable, I suspect today's lengthy grievances are just the first signs of a much bigger change.
For employees, the benefits are obvious. Better access to information, a clearer understanding of their rights and the confidence to challenge employers when something genuinely isn't right. That’s a good thing.
For employers, there's a lesson here too. Treat your people properly, invest in fair employment practices and make sure managers understand their responsibilities. It's a lot cheaper than dealing with the consequences of getting it wrong.
But for HR professionals tasked with managing the complaints, there's a more immediate challenge: how do you cope when the volume and complexity of employee grievances starts to outstrip your capacity to deal with them?
Your employees now have a lawyer in their pocket. Perhaps it's time HR had an AI Assistant of its own.
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Ivan Harding has worked in the HR Technology sector for over 20 years, starting life in IBM before moving onto the Oracle Development team, where he reached Director level. Prior to co-founding Applaud in 2008, Ivan worked with a number of large, global companies, helping them get the most out of their HR Technology investment.