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For years, AI at work felt like a quiet helper in the background. It summarized meetings, suggested text, and answered questions when we asked. That era is ending. The latest AI agents are beginning to move through systems more like teammates. They join projects, update plans, and act across teams. For the first time, organizations are effectively bringing on colleagues that can see more of the workplace than any single person ever could. Ive spent years building tools to give teams clarity and save them time, so I see the upside. But that shift forces a harder question: what does it really mean for an AI to see everything in a workplace? The ethical issue isnt whether agents can technically access information. It is whether their access mirrors what a reasonable employee would encounter in the course of doing their job. When Visibility Turns Into Influence Most workplaces rely on role-based access and permissions to maintain order. People see only the information relevant to their role, and those boundaries shape how teams collaborate and how they resolve disagreements. AI agents complicate that system. If an agent has more access than it should, even by accident, it can surface information that changes how work is interpreted and shifts decisions away from the people meant to make them. These scenarios usually appear in small ways first. An employee might ask an agent a question and receive an answer based on sensitive information they did not realize was in the agents scope. People also produce their best ideas through drafts, notes, and early sketches that are not meant for broad consumption. Even the chance that AI might leverage those early drafts changes how people ideate. They’ll start revising earlier, sharing less freely, and spending more time avoiding misinterpretation. Each incident can seem isolated, but together they alter how authority, context, and trust flow through an organization. What Responsible Use Should Look Like The central question for leaders is not what AI agents are capable of doing; it is what they should be allowed to see. Boundaries must be clear before these systems become part of daily work. An agent working on behalf of an employee should have the same access that employee has, no more and no less. Anything else creates uncertainty. Who can see what? Who can change what? That uncertainty erodes internal trust. Limiting agents to any other standard also creates problems. An agent that lacks access to shared context, public decisions, or common company knowledge will give incomplete or misleading answers. Ethical design is not about minimizing access. It is about giving agents enough accurate, live context to be genuinely useful. Responsibility also has to remain with people. Access defines what an agent can do; accountability defines who owns the outcome. When an agent takes an action, the individual who invoked it should be accountable for the result. Just like a manager owning the work done by their team, delegating tasks to AI can help with efficiency, but decision-making still belongs to the humans who direct the work. Private creative spaces deserve protection as well. Drafts, personal notes, and early explorations help employees test ideas before presenting them. These spaces do not need to be sealed off, but they should be clearly defined and respected. Preserving them supports healthier experimentation and a more open exchange of ideas. Transparency matters throughout this process. Protected spaces only work if the system around them is visible and understandable. When an agent recommends an action or executes one, employees should be able to understand, at a basic level, how it reached that conclusion. As companies adopt AI agents more widely, technical and organizational decisions will converge. The systems will influence how teams collaborate, how information moves, and how people feel about their work. This shapes whether AI becomes a supportive part of the workplace or a source of friction. The issue is no longer whether AI can see everything. It is how leaders define the limits, and how clearly they communicate those choices to the people who rely on them.
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In todays rapidly changing work environment, developing trust among team members is crucial for success. Yet, many organizations struggle to foster an atmosphere of collaboration and understanding, often resulting in communication breakdowns, conflicts, and a decrease in productivity. The inability to trust can be the result of misunderstanding, conflicting values, or misjudging others because they trigger us and remind us of a negative situation or experience in our past. Building our emotional intelligence can help us increase our awareness and become less prone to building up barriers to trust. Trust isnt built through charisma or authorityits built through emotional presence. Leaders who create environments where people feel emotionally safe, seen, and respected accelerate not just connection, but performance, says Dawn Christian, the CEO of BeLeadership, a leadership coaching community. Emotional intelligence means we become more effective at recognizing and managing our own emotions, as well as understanding and influencing the emotions of others. As an author of two books on emotional intelligence, Ive found that by boosting emotional intelligence, leaders and employees can build a culture that reduces and eliminates many of the barriers that lead to a lack of trust. Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five major areas: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Through developing these areas, employees and leaders at all levels can become more adept at navigating through all the areas that build barriers to trust. 1. Self-awareness The first area is being able to reflect on situations. At the end of the day, everyone needs to take an inner journey and consider why they reacted the way they did to a situation. In hindsight, we could ask ourselves how well we managed our reactions in the moment. Would another way of interpreting and reacting have been more effective? Would the outcome have been more positive? Journaling is a known way to aid in the process of self-reflection. It helps us track emotions and reactions and look for patterns that keep coming up that we may want to work on changing. 2. Self-regulation We need to practice self-regulating our emotions. When we notice strong emotions emerging, we need to keep ourselves from reacting. For example, when we have a strong desire to act out from our emotions, count to 10 or remove ourselves from the situation. After taking time to think things through, it is unlikely that we would choose the same response we would if we reacted purely from our emotions. When we continually practice this, we will feel more confident that we have mastered our emotions and wont react in a manner that we may later regret. Busyness doesnt just drain our energyit erodes our emotional capacity . . . Breaking up with busyness isnt about doing lessits about clearing the space where emotional intelligence, trust, and leadership actually take shape, Christian points out. 3. Motivation A good practice is to always view a situation through the lens of how our reactions will serve us. Once we have a firm understanding of our goalsprofessionally and personallyit becomes easier to motivate ourselves. Once we have a clear picture of what we want from life, and where we are going, we are better able to hold ourselves accountable and not deviate from actions that prevent us from moving in the direction of our goals. With this comes a strong realization that we have to be able to collaborate and work as part of a team to succeed. This makes us the kind of person others trust and want to work with. 4. Empathy Practice active listening and empathy. Most of the time when someone is speaking, we are thinking of a response rather than really listening. Everyone has a need to feel that they have been heard. When others are speaking, pay full attention and let them know by your posture and body language that you are engaged. After they have spoken, ask questions to clarify that we have understood them correctly. Even if we do not agree with their perspective, it is crucial that they feel heard and respected. This is a major step towards building trust. 5. Social skills Continually build our social skills through activities that encourage collaboration. Any type of team-building activity is a good way to engage with others in an authentic and supportive manner. Activities in which people share both their successes and their struggles help show that we all have strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Whenever we engage in activities that bring out more of our human side, we build stronger bridges between people and deepen trust.
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The Food and Drug Administration commissioner’s effort to drastically shorten the review of drugs favored by President Donald Trump’s administration is causing alarm across the agency, stoking worries that the plan may run afoul of legal, ethical, and scientific standards long used to vet the safety and effectiveness of new medicines. Marty Makary’s program is causing new anxiety and confusion among staff already rocked by layoffs, buyouts, and leadership upheavals, according to seven current or recently departed staffers. The people spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential agency matters. At the highest levels of the FDA, questions remain about which officials have the legal authority to sign off on drugs cleared under the Commissioners National Priority Voucher program, which promises approval in as little as one month for medicines that support U.S. national interests. Traditionally, approval decisions have nearly always been handled by FDA review scientists and their immediate supervisors, not the agencys political appointees and senior leaders. But drug reviewers say they’ve received little information about the new program’s workings. And some staffers working on a highly anticipated anti-obesity pill were recently told they can skip certain regulatory steps to meet top officials’ aggressive deadlines. Outside experts point out that FDA drug reviewswhich range from six to 10 monthsare already the fastest in the world. The concept of doing a review in one to two months just does not have scientific precedent, said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School. FDA cannot do the same detailed review that it does of a regular application in one to two months, and it doesnt have the resources to do it. On Thursday, Reuters reported that FDA officials have delayed the review of two drugs in the program, in part due to safety concerns, including the death of a patient taking one of the medications. Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the voucher program prioritizes gold standard scientific review and aims to deliver meaningful and effective treatments and cures.” The program remains popular at the White House, where pricing concessions announced by the Republican president have repeatedly been accompanied by FDA vouchers for drugmakers that agree to cut their prices. For instance, when the White House announced that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would reduce prices on their popular obesity drugs, FDA staffers had to scramble to vet new vouchers for both companies in time for Trump’s news conference, according to multiple people involved in the process. Thats sparked widespread concern that FDA drug reviewslong pegged to objective standards and procedureshave become open to political interference. Its extraordinary to have such an opaque application process, one that is obviously susceptible to politicization, said Paul Kim, a former FDA attorney who now works with pharmaceutical clients. Top FDA officials declined to sign off on expedited approvals Many of the concerns around the program stem from the fact that it hasn’t been laid out in federal rules and regulations. The FDA already has more than a half-dozen programs intended to speed up or streamline reviews for promising drugsall approved by Congress, with regulations written by agency staff. In contrast, information about the voucher program is mostly confined to an agency website. Drugmakers can apply by submitting a 350-word statement of interest. Increasingly, agency leaders such as Dr. Vinay Prasad, the FDAs top medical officer and vaccine center director, have been contacting drugmakers directly about awarding vouchers. Thats created quandaries for FDA staffers on even basic questions, such as how to formally award a voucher to a company that didnt request one. Nixon, the HHS spokesman, said that voucher submissions are evaluated by a senior, multidisciplinary review committee, led by Prasad. Questions about the legality of the program led the FDAs then-drug director, Dr. George Tidmarsh, to decline to sign off on approvals under the pathway, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Tidmarsh resigned from the agency in November after a lawsuit challenging his conduct on issues unrelated to the voucher program. After his departure, Dr. Sara Brenner, the FDAs principal deputy commissioner, was set to have the power to decide, but she also declined the role after looking further into the legal implications, according to the people. Currently, the agencys deputy chief medical officer, Dr. Mallika Mundkur, who works under Prasad, is taking on the responsibility. Giving final approval to a drug carries significant legal risks, essentially certifying that the medicine meets FDA standards for safety and effectiveness. If unexpected safety problems later emerge, both the agency and individual staffers could be pulled into investigations or lawsuits. Traditionally, approval comes from FDA drug office directors, made in consultation with a team of reviewers. Under the voucher program, approval comes through a committee vote by senior agency leaders led by Prasad, according to multiple people familiar with the process. Staff reviewers don’t get a vote. It is a complete reversal from the normal review process, which is traditionally led by the scientists who are th ones immersed in the data, said Kesselheim, who is a lawyer and a medical researcher. Not everyone sees problems with the program. Dan Troy, the FDAs top lawyer under President George W. Bush, a Republican, says federal law gives the commissioner broad discretion to reorganize the handling of drug reviews. Still, he says, the voucher program, like many of Makarys initiatives, may be short-lived because it isn’t codified. If you live by the press release then you die by the press release, Troy said. Anything that theyre doing now could be wiped out in a moment by the next administration. The voucher program has ballooned after outreach by FDA officials Initially framed as a pilot program of no more than five drugs, it has expanded to 18 vouchers awarded, with more under consideration. That puts extra pressure on the agencys drug center, where 20% of the staff has left through retirements, buyouts or resignations over the past year. When Makary unveiled the program in October, there were immediate concerns about the unprecedented power he would have in deciding which companies benefit. Makary then said that nominations for drugs would come from career staffers. Indeed, some of the early drugs were recommended by FDA reviewers, according to two people familiar with the process. They said FDA staffers deliberately selected drugs that could be vetted quickly. But, increasingly, selection decisions are led by Prasad or other senior officials, sometimes unbeknownst to FDA staff, according to three people. In one case, FDA reviewers learned from GlaxoSmithKline representatives that Prasad had contacted the company about a voucher. Access to Makary is limited because he does not use a government email account to do business, according to people familiar with the matter, breaking with longstanding precedent. Under pressure from drugmakers, some FDA reviewers were told they can skip steps Once a voucher is awarded, some drugmakers have their own interpretation of the review timeline creating further confusion and anxiety among staff. Two people involved in the ongoing review of Eli Lilly’s anti-obesity pill said company executives initially told the FDA they expected the drug approved within two months. The timeline alarmed FDA reviewers because it did not include the agency’s standard 60-day prefiling period, when staffers check the application to ensure it isnt missing essential information. That 60-day window has been in place for more than 30 years. Lilly pushed for a quicker filing turnaround, demanding one week. Eventually the agency and the company agreed to a two-week period. Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, told attendees at a health care conference on Tuesday that the company expects FDA approval of its pill in the second quarter of the year. Nixon declined to comment on the specifics of Lilly’s review but said FDA reviewers can adjust timelines as needed. Staffers were pushed to keep the application moving forward, even though key pieces of data about the drug’s chemistry appeared to be missing, according to one person involved in the process. When reviewers raised concerns about gaps in the application, the person said, they were told by a senior FDA official that it was OK to overlook the regulations if the science is sound. Former reviewers and outside experts say that approach is the opposite of how FDA reviews should work: By following the regulations, staffers scientifically confirm the safety and effectiveness of drugs. Skipping review steps could also carry risks for drugmakers if future FDA leaders decide a drug wasnt properly vetted. Like other experts, Kesselheim says the program may not last beyond the current administration. They are fundamentally changing the application of the standards, but the underlying law remains what it is, he said. The hope is that one day we will return to these scientifically sound, legally sound principles. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Matthew Perrone, AP health writer
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