Sen. Michelle Hinchey, D-Kingston, is pictured on the Senate floor.

Businesses with more than 50 employees may have to file annual reports with the state on the impact of artificial intelligence on hiring and business practices.

Both houses of the state Legislature approved legislation (S.8706/A.9581) during the end-of-session rush of votes last week. Sponsored by Sen. Michelle Hinchey, D-Kingston, and Assemblyman Harry Bronson, D-Rochester, the legislation passed the Senate 38-22 with Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, voting against and 105-35 in the Assembly with Assemblymen Andrew Molitor, R-Westfield, and Joe Sempolinski, R-Canisteo, both voting against as well. The legislation will be sent to Gov. Kathy Hochul for her signature.

The legislation requires large companies and publicly traded companies to report annually to the Department of Labor on the impact of artificial intelligence on their hiring and business practices; and to require the state Labor Department to produce an annual report based on the companies’ information.

Borrello took particular issue with a $500 a day fine for companies that don’t submit the report to the state.

“Now, I know we’re all concerned about the impact of AI on employment in New York state,” Borrello said on the Senate floor. “But this is a very onerous bill with a $500 per day fine, I believe, for those that don’t comply. The real question is how do we really know AI is impacting it? If I hire someone to do an ad and instead of hiring that person to run ads and do marketing, I use ChatGPT or whatever, I’m not sure if that counts, exactly. If the Department of Labor wants to know the impact of AI on jobs, they can find out. They can do a survey, they can contact employers and they probably should because we are driving enough businesses out of this state without trying to figure out how AI is doing it even better than New York state government is, and I guarantee you, it is not.”

Businesses would be required to report employment data such as hiring, layoffs, attrition, or work hour changes related to AI use and information on the nature of AI use that include objectives, human oversight and protections. Hinchey said in her legislative justification that some national data on AI adoption shows it was responsible for almost 55,000 layoffs in 2025, or almost 5% of all layoffs nationally. She said there are also questions about the nature of AI job replacement, such as whether it will lead directly to layoffs versus discouraging future hiring through attrition.

“A.I. is here,” Hinchey said. “No one is disputing that. And there are a lot of really great ways that we can use that in our lives that are already happening. However it is having a major impact on our workforce. In fact we have seen numerous companies laying off not five, 10, 15 people, but thousands of people at a clip. That’s thousands of people who are unemployed overnight. We don’t know what the scale of this will be. We don’t know what the impact to our workforce will be. We don’t know what the need for our unemployment systems will be because of the rise in AI in our workforce.”

According to an April Associated Press story, recent Gallup polling finds that while more employees are using AI frequently in their work, there’s been an uptick in alarm that new technologies will replace their jobs. Many workers who are not using AI say they prefer to work without it, have ethical oppositions to the technology or worry about data privacy. The poll, conducted in February, points to a divergence in how AI is reshaping American workplaces. Some find it to be a gamechanger for productivity and efficiency, while others are concerned about its potentially negative impacts.

Roughly 3 in 10 employees are frequent users of AI in their jobs, meaning they use it daily or a few times a week. About 2 in 10 are infrequent users, using AI tools at work a few times a month or a few times a year.

The Gallup poll found that about 4 in 10 workers say their organization has adopted AI tools or technology to improve organizational practices. About two-thirds of those workers say AI has had an “extremely” or “somewhat” positive impact on their individual productivity and efficiency at work.

Workers using AI in management roles are more likely to say the technology has been at least “somewhat” positive for their productivity, compared with individual contributors. About 7 in 10 leaders using AI at least a few times a year say AI has made them more efficient at work, compared with just over half of individual contributors.

AI tools appear to have a greater benefit for workers in managerial, health care and technology roles than in service jobs. About 6 in 10 employees in those fields who are using AI say it’s boosted their productivity at least “somewhat,” compared with 45% of those using it in service jobs.

Among workers who have AI tools available at their company and don’t use them, 46% say it’s because they prefer to keep doing their work the way they do it now. About 4 in 10 non-users who have AI available to them report that they are ethically opposed to AI, are concerned about data privacy or don’t believe AI can be helpful for the work they do.