A look at Aware, whose AI tools let companies track real-time employee sentiment and flag toxicity by monitoring staff chatter on Slack, Teams, and other apps
CNBCHayden Field
Context & Ripple Effects
Aware had already built its internal-chat analysis around legal compliance and sentiment, supported by a $60M Series C in 2021. This coverage shows that same capability being framed as an always-on workplace-management tool rather than solely a compliance function.
Employers using Aware can convert conversations in Slack, Teams and similar tools into real-time sentiment and toxicity signals for managers or compliance teams.
Employees’ routine workplace messages become analyzable inputs for behavioral and cultural monitoring, not just collaboration and recordkeeping.
Second-order effects
The product further blurs the line between compliance software and workforce surveillance, pushing collaboration-platform and governance vendors to make their monitoring, access-control and audit features more legible to enterprise buyers.
Customers must decide who can see inferred sentiment or toxicity signals and how those signals are used, making deployment policy as consequential as the underlying model.
Third-order effects
If adoption broadens, workplace communication systems could become a persistent management-data layer, with sentiment analysis treated as a standard enterprise control rather than a niche HR feature.
That shift would sharpen scrutiny of the boundary between legitimate compliance review and employee monitoring, especially where automated inferences may be biased or difficult for workers to contest.
The trend: AI is moving from assisting work inside enterprise software to continuously interpreting workers’ digital behavior for management and compliance purposes.
Ah yeah, the brilliant uses of ML/AI: even more creepy tracking of people when the power imbalance makes them without leverage to fix it. Also... “Deliver a better employee experience and simplify strategic decisions with a platform designed to unlock detailed insight into the m…
Two of the many insidious things about enterprise software: 1) It's usually awful, because the users (workers) are typically not the buyers (bosses). 2) It's often pitched as soothing a company's fears, e.g. YOUR EMPLOYEES HATE YOU. DON'T YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW MUCH? Idk. https:…
This is terrifying but a great reminder that your corporate Slack (or other chat program, most likely) has never ever been safe and you should take any conversation you don't want management snooping on to Signal or somewhere else safe. https://www.cnbc.com/...
This is terrifying but a great reminder that your corporate Slack (or other chat program, most likely) has never ever been safe and you should take any conversation you don't want management snooping on to Signal or somewhere else safe. https://www.cnbc.com/...
NEW: Depending on where you work, there's a significant chance that AI is analyzing your messages on Slack, Teams, Zoom & more. Huge U.S. employers like Walmart, Delta, T-Mobile, Chevron & Starbucks have turned to Aware AI to monitor employee chatter. https://www.cnbc.com/...
I am constantly surprised how often people feel comfortable having conversations on company Slack, email servers, even devices. If someone else owns it, it's not private! https://www.cnbc.com/...
Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages | “A lot of this becomes thought crime” “This is treating people like inventory.”
Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages | “A lot of this becomes thought crime” “This is treating people like inventory.”