A desire to remain compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy laws has made HR leaders wary of any new technology that digs too deeply into employee emails. This is understandable, as GDPR non-compliance pay lead to stiff penalties.

At the same time, new technologies are applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to solve HR problems like analyzing employee data to help with hiring, completing performance reviews or tracking employee engagement. This has great potential for helping businesses coach and empower employees (and thus help them retain top talent), but these tools often analyze employee emails as a data source. Does this create a privacy issue in regard to the GDPR?