Court of Rome: in dismissal for justified objective reason, AI is a clue and does not replace proof of the crisis and the impossibility of relocating the worker.

The Court of Rome – Labour Section returned to the issue of dismissal for justified objective reason (Article 3, Law 604/1966), offering a topical starting point: in the specific case, the company had also introduced artificial intelligence tools to make time and costs more efficient, but the Judge clarified that this element, alone, does not "explain" or legitimize the termination.

In fact, the Court considered the dismissal legitimate because the company provided a solid evidentiary system on two classic profiles:

1. the existence of a real and documented economic crisis, such as to make it necessary to reorganize focused on the core business;

2. the impossibility of relocating the worker (the so-called repechage), which continues to burden the employer as an integral part of the "justified reason", according to a consolidated orientation of the Supreme Court also referred to in the motivation.

On the merits, the crisis had been supported by a series of converging circumstances: changes in the corporate structure, internal closures and reductions, termination of further employment relationships, critical issues on company premises (up to eviction for arrears) and the launch of business crisis management tools. In this context, the reduction of the department in which the applicant worked – which was not central to the production area – was assessed as consistent with the organisational choice.

As for AI, the reference emerged above all through a testimony: the former employee had described a period of company contraction in which, in the face of the consolidation of activities and the reduction of resources, AI tools had been used to maintain the quality of the output and compress time/costs. For the Court, however, this figure remains a clue compatible with the scenario of difficulty, not the "cause" of the dismissal: the adoption of technology does not replace the employer's burden of demonstrating crisis, reorganization and impossibility of reemployment.

The operational message is quite clear: technological innovation can enter the process as a contextual element, but it does not automatically become the justification for withdrawal.

On a prospective level, the decision also opens up an interesting reasoning (although not directly developed by the Court): in reorganizations where AI is invoked as a lever for efficiency, the overall economic consistency of the choices (costs of the solutions adopted, relocation alternatives and compatibility of tasks) could become relevant, bearing in mind that the repechage obligationIt remains an essential step and that, in any case, the employer is not required to provide "new" or radically different training to create an ad hoc position.