Accountability laundering and the automation of responsibility in workplace e-learning

Purpose This viewpoint argues that AI-mediated mandatory compliance e-learning functions as a mechanism of accountability laundering: a process through which organisations discharge the appearance of pedagogical responsibility without the substance of it. Drawing specifically on the case of neurodivergent workers, the paper exposes the structural decoupling at the heart of contemporary responsible enterprise discourse and calls for a fundamental reorientation of how learning accountability is understood and enacted in organisational settings. Design/methodology/approach This theoretically grounded viewpoint paper is informed by both authors' qualitative research with neurodivergent adult learners in asynchronous workplace e-learning contexts. It is situated within critical management studies and institutional theory and engages with emerging scholarship on AI governance in e-learning design. Findings In its current dominant forms, the spread of generative-AI tools through compliance training does not necessarily represent a pedagogical advance. It tends to represent the industrialisation of a system that was already designed to process rather than to educate. This happens in two ways. Generative AI produces compliance content at scale with no guarantee of accuracy or contextual fit and the analytics layered on top of it tracks engagement against a single linear pathway, treating any deviation from that pathway as failure rather than as a different but valid route through the material. For neurodivergent workers, AI-mediated compliance e-learning risks reproducing and accelerating structural exclusion while generating completion data that organisations present as evidence of responsible practice. This is not responsible pedagogy. It is the performance of responsibility, underpinned by technological legitimacy. Originality/value The paper introduces the concept of accountability laundering to the responsible enterprise pedagogy literature. It also extends responsible enterprise pedagogy beyond its established business-school setting, by arguing that the learning architectures through which organisations deliver mandatory workplace training are themselves sites of responsible enterprise practice that have so far received little critical attention. It further positions neurodivergent workers as diagnostic figures whose experiences expose the fault lines in how organisations conceptualise learning obligations, AI governance and institutional accountability.