When AI Becomes Your “Colleague”: Digital Employees, Work Data, and the Reshaping of Labor Relations

As companies begin to train “digital replicas” on employees’ chat histories, writing styles, and decision-making patterns, a fundamental question emerges. Is AI simply improving workplace efficiency, or is human labor being further datafied and turned into an organizational asset?In this episode, Dr. Dong Ting, Associate Research Fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy, Tsinghua University, and Dr. Xu Jia, Research Fellow at the Shanghai AI Laboratory, speak with Ms. Zhu Lingfeng, Head of Data and Privacy Legal Affairs at Meituan, author of AI Compliance and Data Compliance, and creator of the WeChat account “那一片数据星辰.”Drawing on her frontline experience in AI and data compliance, Ms. Zhu discusses the rise of “digital employees” in the age of large language models, their legal status, the governance challenges they pose, and the shifting boundaries between human labor and machine agency. The conversation examines who should be responsible for AI actions, how existing legal frameworks respond to these changes, and what the future of human–AI labor relations may look like.