AI promises productivity, but for managers, it’s mostly a headache for now

A Nielsen survey commissioned by Monday.com found that AI tools are making employee oversight harder for many managers even as they remain enthusiastic about the technology. More than half of 1,700 directors and senior managers surveyed across seven countries said AI has made it harder to evaluate employees’ work, while nearly half said they now spend more time reviewing and guiding team output. Polished AI-assisted work can obscure how much was created by an employee versus a model. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said they have changed employee evaluation methods after adopting AI, giving more weight to prompting, task delegation, and experimentation. Forty-six percent use AI to inform decisions and 39% use it to draft performance reviews. Monday.com’s Michal Miller Levi said companies have not yet resolved concerns about AI bias in performance assessments. The survey cited research finding that language models can reproduce human rating patterns and may show varying biases across social groups. AI adoption has also expanded software-management and governance demands. Fifty-seven percent reported more tools in use, 51% said their tools had become more interdependent, and only 29% described their AI infrastructure as fully optimized and centralized. Fifty-eight percent expect to oversee more AI agents than human employees within a year; 46% worry about losing control of agent actions, and 35% fear being held responsible for AI-made decisions.