TL;DR
More than half of UK HR professionals now report employees using AI to write grievances, complaints and appeals. Employment lawyers say the resulting documents read like legal submissions but frequently cite irrelevant or outdated law, and the advice is to answer the underlying problem rather than the prose. The timing matters: unfair dismissal rights arrive far earlier in employment from January 2027.
What is actually arriving
Tim Lang, an employment partner at mfg Solicitors, describes a steady stream of employers seeking advice on complaints that appear professionally drafted but were produced with an AI tool.
“AI does not know or understand the full extent of the law or the individual issues of the complaint, so can only be guided by what a person puts in,” he said. “This can make complaints appear more serious at first glance.”
The practical failure mode is inflation. A routine workplace concern arrives dressed in statute references and case law, and the employer burns time rebutting the framing instead of resolving the issue underneath it.
The advice is unglamorous
Lang’s guidance is procedural rather than technological. Identify the core concern. Meet the employee and ask them directly what the problem is. Investigate the facts. Follow the grievance procedure you already have, consistently.
Two specific warnings: do not answer point by point, which rewards volume; and do not use AI to draft your reply. Nor can these complaints be dismissed as machine-generated noise — an inflated grievance is still a grievance, and must be handled as one.
Looking forward
The deadline is what gives this weight for smaller employers. From January 2027, the Employment Rights Act shortens how long someone must be employed before they can lodge an unfair dismissal claim, removing the buffer that has historically absorbed weak process.
That combination — complaints that look more formidable than they are, and staff who can escalate sooner — falls hardest on firms without a dedicated HR function. The fix costs nothing but attention: a written grievance procedure, applied the same way every time, from an employee’s first day. Firms that have one will find AI-drafted complaints an irritant. Firms that do not will find them expensive.