An inquiry opened last week into a scandal that has horrified Britons: how hundreds of people running UK post offices were wrongly prosecuted for false accounting and theft on the basis of a faulty computer system. A judge has called the Post Office’s insistence that the software was infallible “the 21st-century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat”. Yet many other companies are in danger of believing computers over humans as well.

A swath of new technology products has come on to the market in recent years, many of which promise to use artificial intelligence to manage, coach, score or monitor a company’s employees. So-called algorithmic management has spread from gig platforms and logistics warehouses into a range of other sectors and occupations, hastened by the pandemic.

Coworker.org, a worker organising platform, has compiled a database of more than 550 such products. About 30 per cent emerged between 2020 and 2021, while the rest were developed between 2018 and 2020. It calls this ecosystem “l(fā)ittle tech”: companies which don’t get the attention the Big Tech giants do, but are nonetheless having an impact on people’s working lives.