The Fair Work Commission is being swamped by AI
Meritless, AI-assisted claims are straining the Commission, delaying decisions and diverting resources from cases that matter.
The Fair Work Commission is being buried by artificial intelligence, and the people paying the price are the workers and employers waiting on decisions that matter.
The statistics are alarming. The Commission received 44,075 lodgements in total across the 2024/25 financial year. As Justice Adam Hatcher noted in his presentation to the Victorian Bar Association in late February, the “normal” up until 2023 was just above 30,000 lodgements a year.
For 2025-26, projections sit between 50,000 and 55,000. General protections and unfair dismissal claims have been identified as the key areas of growth, with an increased volume of claims, many with little merit. Notably, the historical correlation between dismissal-related applications and the general state of the labour market is no longer clear.
The growth is principally due to the increasing use of AI tools by potential litigants. These tools can interpret the law incorrectly, hallucinate made-up cases, citations and legislative provisions, invent facts to justify a position, and produce submissions that are repetitive, lengthy and incoherent.
