AEDT Notices for Internal Promotions and Employees

When the Promotion List Runs Through an AEDT

Forty employees are up for a team-lead role. HR runs them through the same video-interview scoring tool the company uses for external hires — same rubric, same vendor, same output. Someone on the promotion committee asks the obvious question a week before the panel meets: do we need to send anything to the people being screened, or does the notice rule only apply to outside candidates?

It's a fair question, and it's the one that trips up more HR teams than almost any other Local Law 144 detail. The instinct is to treat "candidate" as meaning someone from outside the building — a resume in an applicant tracking system, not a person who already has a badge and a manager. That instinct is wrong, and it's wrong in a way that has real deadline consequences, because the notice clock for an internal promotion screen runs exactly the same way it does for an external hire.

By the end of this, you'll know exactly when the AEDT notice for internal promotions and employees fires, what it has to contain, and how to build it into your promotion cycle so it doesn't get missed the next time a tool touches your own roster instead of an outside applicant pool.

What Local Law 144 Actually Covers

Local Law 144 defines an automated employment decision tool by what it does, not by who it's evaluating. An AEDT is any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or AI that produces a simplified output — a score, a classification, a recommendation — used to substantially assist or replace discretionary decision-making about employment (Perkins Coie, 2023). Nothing in that definition carves out internal candidates. A tool that ranks employees for a promotion, scores them on a video interview for an internal transfer, or filters them for a lateral move is functioning the same way a resume-screening tool functions for an external req — it's substantially assisting a decision about someone's employment.

The law became effective January 1, 2023, with enforcement beginning July 5, 2023 after a delay from an originally announced April 15, 2023 start (Epstein Becker Green / Workforce Bulletin, 2023). The three core obligations attach to any covered use of an AEDT: an annual independent bias audit, a public summary of the most recent audit results posted on the employer's website along with the AEDT's distribution date, and — the piece that matters for this article — notice to the person being screened at least 10 business days before the tool is used, with a path to request an alternative process or accommodation (Crowell & Moring LLP, 2023; Epstein Becker Green, 2023). That third obligation doesn't distinguish between "candidate" in the recruiting sense and "employee" in the promotion sense. If the tool is substantially assisting a decision about your employment — including whether you move up — the notice duty is live.

The AEDT Notice for Internal Promotions and Employees: What It Must Say and When

Once you accept that internal moves are in scope, the mechanics of the AEDT notice for internal promotions and employees are the same mechanics that apply to any other covered use. The notice has to go out at least 10 business days before the tool screens the employee — not 10 business days before the promotion decision, not 10 business days before the panel meets, but before the AEDT itself runs. It has to identify that an automated tool is being used, describe in general terms the job qualifications and characteristics the tool assesses, and tell the employee how to request an alternative selection process or a reasonable accommodation instead.

The practical trap is timing. External hiring notices usually get built into a requisition workflow that already has a clock running — job posted, applications close, screening begins. Internal promotion cycles don't always have that same structure. A promotion list can be finalized informally, a video-scoring tool can be scheduled on short notice because the panel wants results fast, and the 10-business-day window can quietly evaporate before anyone remembers it exists. If your organization runs a screener, a video-interview tool, or a ranking model against employees the same way it runs one against outside candidates, that internal use needs its own entry on the notice calendar — not an assumption that the external process already covers it.

Why Internal Screens Get Overlooked — And What That Costs

This isn't a hypothetical gap. Independent research into how employers are actually complying with Local Law 144's transparency requirements found that out of 391 employers reviewed, only 13 had posted the required candidate transparency notice at all, and only 18 had posted an audit summary (ACM FAccT, Wright & Muenster et al., 2024). Those numbers describe general notice compliance, not internal-promotion compliance specifically — but they tell you something useful: even the notice obligations employers know apply to them are being missed at scale. An obligation employers don't realize applies to them — an internal promotion screen — is not likely to fare better.

The penalty structure doesn't soften for good intentions. Civil penalties run up to $500 for a first violation, with each additional violation on the same day counted separately, and $500 to $1,500 for each subsequent violation, accruing per violation per day (Office of the NY State Comptroller, 2025). A missed notice to forty employees in a promotion pool isn't one violation — depending on how it's counted, it can be forty.

A tool that scores your own employees for advancement is still substantially assisting an employment decision. The notice duty doesn't check whether the person already works for you.

None of this is legal advice, and this article isn't a substitute for confirming your specific fact pattern with DCWP or with outside counsel — particularly around edge cases like informal promotion processes, competency-based internal mobility platforms, or tools shared across an entire employee lifecycle rather than a single event. What this article does is describe the operational mechanic clearly enough that you can build a process around it.

Building the Notice Into Your Promotion Cycle

The fix is procedural, not technical. Before any promotion cycle touches an AEDT — whether that's a resume-style screener repurposed for internal transfers, a video-interview scoring tool, or a ranking model applied to a shortlist — treat it exactly like an external req: confirm the tool meets the statutory definition, calendar the 10-business-day notice window before the tool runs, and use notice language that matches what a proper external notice contains, adapted for an internal audience. The content requirements don't change based on who's being screened, and a good starting reference for what belongs in any AEDT notice — external or internal — is covered in what an AEDT candidate notice must include and in the mechanics of the 10-business-day notice window itself. If your organization is still building out its baseline understanding of the notice duty generally, the Local Law 144 candidate notice requirements overview and the broader NYC Local Law 144 compliance guide are the right places to start. If the internal tool in question is a video-interview product specifically, the considerations in video interview AI and the NY bias audit apply just as directly to internal candidates as external ones.

The First Action Item

The tools described in this article don't perform, certify, or sign a bias audit, and they never score any individual employee or candidate — that work stays with your independently engaged auditor and with the AEDT vendor. What they do is keep the notice operation itself from slipping, on internal promotion cycles the same way they do on external hiring.

The Candidate Notice Operations Workbook — Screener / Video / Ranking Notice Sets is built around exactly this gap: separate, ready-to-adapt notice sets for screener tools, video-interview tools, and ranking tools, structured so an internal promotion use gets the same disciplined 10-business-day tracking as any outside req. Download it, drop your next promotion cycle's AEDT use into the tracker, and confirm the window before the tool runs — not after someone asks whether it already should have.