SECOIA Deal celebrates Europe by publishing its report
After two years of intensive, rich and exciting work, the European project SECOIA Deal (Serving Confidence in AI through Dialogue) has sent its main conclusions and proposals to the European Commission in a report available in five languages.
This project, led by the CFE-CGC in collaboration with its partners (IRES, Astrées, CIDA and U2P), which are associated (to be detailed), has formed and brought together a community of European actors from various backgrounds (AI experts, HR experts, software publishers, lawyers, trade unionists, leaders of small businesses, managers, researchers, …) sharing the desire to work collectively on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and Social Dialogue. The method of co-construction deployed by the SECOIA Deal community (choice of themes for exploration and experimentation, development of tools made available) prefigures in itself a new form of enriched dialogue.
SECOIA Deal has endeavored to explore the transformations brought about by AI from an economic point of view, by questioning the creation and sharing of value, and from an organizational point of view, by focusing on the managerial consequences and the evolution of managers’ skills in the context of AI deployment.
The work of the community has highlighted three specificities of AI that should be considered for a social dialogue that has to be « professionalized ». These are temporality (with the iterative and therefore always unfinished process of AI systems); space (with the decompartmentalization of activities); and relationship (in the sense of interactions with users). The renewed dialogue must encompass all of these dimensions in terms of the themes addressed (tools, trades, tasks, skills, organization, etc.), its temporality (upstream, downstream), the stakeholders involved, and its perimeter (company, industry, value chain, etc.).
These structuring transformations require the establishment of a climate of trust, in the same spirit as that proposed by the European regulation currently being adopted on AI, which provides a framework for so-called « high-risk » systems and sets out rules for transparency, control, security and governance, where employee representatives have a role to play as « operational watchdogs » to bring greater efficiency to this regulation.
The answers provided by the project community are above all pragmatic. They take the form of « operational bricks » to be mobilized at the discretion of users (negotiators, experts). The renewal of social dialogue and its modalities can only be effective by starting from practices, by adopting a « Bottom Up » approach, by sharing diagnoses and by raising the awareness of and supporting all the stakeholders concerned (directors, managers, employees and employee representatives) with the help of dedicated training, as designed by the project.
During the final conference of the project in Brussels on January 17th, the SECOIA Deal Community published a manifesto. On this Europe Day, it is publishing its report explaining and detailing the project proposals for dissemination in all member countries.