Mar 03, 2026
3 min read
For the first time in Italy, a court has recognized the legality of dismissals in which artificial intelligence played a role...
issue no.9135 of 19 November 2025, no
The Rome court officially opened a new page in the history of Italian labor law.For the first time a
Judge recognized as legitimate a
Dismissal for "justifiable reasons" due to company restructuring where special equipment contributes to increased workload.
The story involved one
Architect A
The company is active in the sector
Internet Security.The company, which is struggling with a level of economic activity, decided to redesign its internal structure: some functions were organized, work flows were improved for the introduction of
new technological tools thereby
Employee roles overlapped.Ultimately, the result was dismissal, and the employee raised an objection and went all the way to the judge.
As the judge explained: the rules don't change, the context changes
The court recognized the legality of the dismissal and strictly applied the already uniform rules of Italian labor law.In order for the "just objective reason" to be considered valid, three basic conditions must be present:
Existence of real financial and organizational needs;
A direct causal link between restructuring and job losses;
the impossibility of transferring the employee to another job in the company (the so-called redundancy obligation).
In this case, the judge considered that all three conditions were met.Artificial Intelligence is not promoted as a separate legal cause of dismissal, but is framed as one of the tools to make the company's structure more efficient.
Essentially, the ruling makes it clear that using AI is not enough to justify staff cuts: the logic is the same as when the introduction of accounting software years ago made certain numbers redundant in traditional manual records.There are no technical barriers to termination, but no arbitrary shortcuts either.
Business efficiency and social cost: two sides of the same coin
From a strictly legal point of view, the Court's reasoning seems coherent and well argued.However, at the social level,
The decision raises questions that go far beyond the individual file.The Italian labor market presents structural characteristics that increase the impact of any restructuring: low professional mobility, difficulty in retraining for those who lose their jobs, and a productive fabric dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises with limited resources to invest in training.In this context,
Not every job is a transition to new opportunities, but it eliminates the risk of long-term exclusion from the job market.
The principle of repatriation - which obliges the company to verify the possibility of transferring the employee to compatible tasks before layoffs - remains formally central to the regulatory framework.However - as evidenced by many disputes - in practice one often encounters reduced staffing levels, increasingly specialized profiles and insufficient investment in workforce development.
AI, in this context, is not a problem in itself: it is an economic accelerator that accelerates rationalization processes, reduces costs and allows fewer people to perform more tasks.All this is legal from the point of view of freedom of business, but it has a concrete and measurable effect on employment.
The future of work is managed today: the challenge for policy
Labor law experts who analyzed the judgment agree on one essential point: the court did not change the rules of the game, but simply applied them to the production reality that is evolving much faster than the regulatory framework of reference.And this is where the broader question arises, a question that case law alone cannot resolve.If technological innovation is used mainly as a lever to reduce costs, without a parallel system of policies to guide, rehabilitate and actively protect workers, the main danger is that this labor law eventually legitimizes formally correct but socially unbalanced changes.
Rome's decision does not consecrate automation or relegate workers to algorithms.However, it marks the definitive entry of artificial intelligence into the normality of labor litigation.And although justice is imposed by the rules, the system as a whole – companies, unions and politics – is called upon to answer an inevitable question: how to govern innovation without turning it into a silent job-loss machine?The story of the Roman graphic artist is not just a story of dismissal.It's for what's to come.
