Like many domestic workers, Leydy is no stranger to wage theft. In a previous job, Leydy had been hired as a cleaner and then asked to take on more and more responsibilities, from cooking to childcare—with no additional pay. When she approached her employer and said she either needed a raise or additional help, she was fired, and she never got paid for her work that week.
“In my rage, I went to the police,” she told Fast Company through a translator. (Leydy requested to only use her first name to avoid potential retaliation.) “They told me I had to get a lawyer and go to court in Newark. If I wasn’t getting paid, how could I pay for a lawyer?”
A new AI chatbot built by and for domestic workers could help people like Leydy find some recourse when they are confronted with abusive employers. The National Domestic Workers Alliance—a nonprofit that advocates to improve labor rights and working conditions for nannies, cleaners, and home care workers—just launched a multilingual chatbot called Ask Aya, which aims to help educate domestic workers on their rights, negotiate pay with employers, and even draft employment contracts.
Over the years, NDWA has experimented with different tech solutions to improve outreach and foster solidarity among domestic workers, who tend to work alone and are often siloed in their jobs. These workers are also overwhelmingly women of color—a significant share of whom are also undocumented—and they are excluded from federal labor protections, which leaves them vulnerable to being exploited in the workplace and at greater risk of retaliation if they push back. NDWA has invested in tools to help these workers create written contracts to formalize their employment and even secure benefits like paid time off; during the pandemic, NDWA’s Coronavirus Care Fund provided tens of millions of dollars in cash assistance to domestic workers who suddenly found themselves out of a job.
When NDWA conceived of Ask Aya, the intent was to center workers in the development process, to ensure that the use of AI felt intentional and complementary to the critical work its organizers do on the ground. “We did not start with a goal to harness AI and immediately apply it to our problems,” says Alistair Stephenson, the chief strategy and impact officer of NDWA. “We started with this problem of isolation. If it is true that domestic workers are in these high stakes spaces and private homes and don’t have much community or support anywhere, should AI be a tool we explore to supercharge that connection and that sense of support?”
But NDWA wanted to ensure there were guardrails around the use of AI, especially because the organization was designing Ask Aya for a population of workers who are already susceptible to mistreatment—and more likely to feel the negative effects of heightened automation and surveillance in the era of AI. “Trust is absolutely the currency of care and organizing, so we don’t take this question lightly,” Stephenson says.
NDWA started with a policy charter that would guide the development process, and the organization brought domestic workers into the process from the very beginning, drawing on feedback from over a thousand workers to better understand what they would find most valuable. From there, NDWA partnered with workers to build a database of vetted information to feed into the platform.
Stephenson knew privacy would be a major concern for some workers, who might not be comfortable feeding personal information into a chatbot. To help address those fears, Ask Aya has a seven-day data deletion window.
“The majority are women and undocumented,” says Elza, a home care worker who was part of the AI council that NDWA consulted while developing Ask Aya. “So with that, there’s always fear. Maybe you want to ask [a question], but you’re afraid to ask. So one of the things that I spoke about was that [Ask Aya] had to be something that could be trusted.” (Elza is also using only her first name to protect her identity.)
Beyond that, striking the right tone—and offering multilingual support—was also an important part of the development process. Ask Aya is currently available in English and Spanish, which means many workers can communicate in their native language.
“We have put so much work into the design and personality of Ask Aya as another channel where people can feel dignified in a world where their work is constantly degraded,” Stephenson says. “I spoke to a worker who said Aya has the vocabulary and the understanding of what [their] work really means . . . It mirrors how organizers are trained to approach and connect with domestic workers. But [the fact] that we can train a model to have that kind of value system and personality and then scale that model is pretty remarkable.”
Still, the platform is also engineered to direct workers to connect with a human organizer when they need more extensive counsel. When testing out Ask Aya, by posing as a worker facing wage theft, Elza was pleasantly surprised to see that the platform directed her to the Connecticut Worker Center, an affiliate of NDWA where she works.
So far, Ask Aya seems to be having the intended effect: During beta testing, NDWA found that 93% of workers started to apply the chatbot’s advice in real situations, and 25% of them successfully negotiated pay increases. Over three-quarters of them said they trusted Ask Aya “completely” or “quite a bit.” It was a sample size of just 35 domestic workers, across different sectors and languages, but NDWA’s hope is that this effect will scale as the platform gets in front of workers across the country.
“What we are trying to do is establish Ask Aya as an example of what a more responsible, ethical, worker-governed path for AI could look like,” Stephenson says. “We call it dignity-driven AI, as opposed to extractive AI.”
With the help of Ask Aya, Leydy realized that she was being paid less than the minimum wage in her current cleaning job—and that she could earn even more because of her experience level. She was hesitant to broach the issue with her employer, but Ask Aya helped her practice and prepare for the conversation with different prompts.
“I was scared I would get fired,” she says. “I was worried that the first thing I would hear is: ‘You don’t want to work? Then go home.’”
When she finally talked to her employer, she managed to negotiate a raise of $2 an hour, boosting her hourly pay to $17. In the last few weeks, she even secured a week of paid vacation.
“Many [people] can react and say, ‘Only $2?’” Leydy says. “But I was super emotional. I’m a single mom, and $2 an hour extra at this point is amazing. For me, this was an amazing accomplishment.”
