An employee didn’t get their paycheck on the last cycle. Mistakes happen, for sure, but according to their recent Reddit post, the reason was that an AI-powered payroll tool decided that their timecard was “irregular” and halted the deposit.
AI can do a lot of cool things for you. It can help with scheduling, answer simple questions, and tell you what code you need to copy and paste into your Excel file to parse your data correctly. Miraculous.
However, as this glitch shows, AI should never be the final decision maker. The poster did not mention where they were located — perhaps they are in the U.S., and perhaps they are somewhere else. (They said they only get paid once per month and that is unusual in the U.S., but common elsewhere.)
In the U.S., failing to pay employees on time violates federal and state wage laws — and “the algorithm did it” won’t hold up in court. In Europe, late pay can trigger labor inspections or penalties.
Beyond fines, it’s a huge reputational risk: imagine explaining to LinkedIn that your payroll AI ghosted someone’s rent money.
Why AI mistakes are human mistakes
It’s very lovely to blame problems on an algorithm, which, according to the OP, is precisely what their company did. They wrote:
To keep reading, click here: An AI Tool Withheld an Employee’s Paycheck. That’s Really a Human Error
It’s one thing for an AI to flag something that looks off to it.
It’s another to not have a human being review it before *depriving someone of their paycheck*.
And it’s another thing entirely that *they have no mechanism to fix the obvious error* before the next pay period. If they *can’t* cut a manual check (or direct deposit, or whatever*, then whoever designed the system is criminally negligent. If they can but *won’t*, a number of people are.