Approving an AI tool is what brings in the works council.

An HR director wants managers to stop pasting performance notes into public chatbots, so they propose an approved assistant: company accounts, single sign-on, every question logged for security. It is the right instinct. In Germany it is also the step that turns an IT decision into a co-determination matter, because the employer now runs a system that records what named employees ask, and when.

What the Hamburg court decided

A works council asked the Hamburg labour court for an urgent order to stop its employer from allowing a public chatbot and similar tools. The employer had published guidelines permitting their use in a browser, through employees' own private accounts, with no company licence. The court refused. The guidelines concerned how the work itself is done; the browser, not the chatbot, was the technical device; and because the employer had no access to what employees entered, there was no pressure of surveillance.

Why an approved tool changes the analysis

Turn each of those facts around and you have a typical enterprise rollout. The employer buys the licence. Employees sign in with company identities. Questions and answers are logged, often precisely so that security can review them. Section 87(1) no. 6 of the Works Constitution Act gives the works council a say over technical systems suited to monitoring employees' behaviour or performance, and the Federal Labour Court reads “suited” broadly: the system does not have to be used to monitor anyone, only to be able to.

Two of its rulings mark the edges. In March 2022 it held that the company-wide use of a standard office suite, with the possibility of central control of behaviour and performance, required a works agreement at group level (1 ABR 20/21). In July 2024 it held that a headset letting supervisors listen in on staff was a monitoring device even though nothing was recorded, because “a recording or storage of the behaviour- or performance-related data is not strictly necessary for the process of monitoring” (1 ABR 16/23). An assistant that logs every question by name sits comfortably inside that definition.

Other countries reach a similar point by other routes. In France, the Labour Code requires the social and economic committee to be informed and consulted on the introduction of new technologies and on any significant change to working conditions (article L2312-8).

It is already happening at the table

In a November 2025 survey of more than 400 European employers, 44% said AI had come up in discussions with their union or works council in the past year, rising to 52% in Germany. A December 2025 trade-union review found that one in five European service-sector unions already had a collective agreement addressing AI, and 42% were in some form of dialogue about it. The conversation is not hypothetical; the question is whether the employer arrives with a draft or without one.

The AI Act adds a second clock

For uses the AI Act treats as high-risk, including AI used for decisions on promotion, to allocate tasks or to monitor and evaluate workers, Article 26(7) requires employers to inform workers' representatives and the affected workers before the system is used at work. Article 26(2) requires that human oversight be assigned to people with “the necessary competence, training and authority”, and Article 26(6) requires logs to be kept for at least six months. After the Digital Omnibus of July 2026, those obligations apply from 2 December 2027. An agreement signed for the pilot can be written to cover both.

What a works council will reasonably ask

1. What is logged: the question, the answer, the sources read, and under whose identity.
2. Who can read the log, for what purpose, and how long entries are kept.
3. What the system will not be used for. A clear purpose limit, such as no evaluation of the people asking, is usually the centre of the agreement.
4. Whether any output ranks or scores individual employees, and who sees it.
5. How employees are told, and where they can raise questions.

Start with the agreement

The fastest route is to treat the works council as the first design review. Draft the agreement alongside the pilot: purpose, logging, access to logs, retention, limits on evaluation and a review date. Configuring a tool to an agreement is far easier than renegotiating an agreement around a tool already in use. That is why, in our own deployments, logging, retention and access to the audit trail are set per client, so they can follow the agreement rather than lead it.