Companies are giving employees AI tools to help them work faster. A new survey suggests those tools are creating new problems for the managers who oversee them.
The survey was conducted by Nielsen and commissioned by work-management company Monday.com. It polled 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries.
More than half of senior leaders said it has become harder to evaluate employees’ work since adopting AI. Much of the work now arrives polished, so it is hard to tell what the employee did and what AI produced.
As a result, nearly half of managers said they spend more time reviewing and guiding their teams’ output than they did before.
Managers Remain Excited About AI
The findings do not show managers turning against the technology. In fact, 94% said they were excited to improve work using AI.
Michal Miller Levi, head of market research and customer insights at Monday.com, compared the excitement to the early days of the internet. She told TechCrunch the problem is that AI is developing faster than companies can adapt.
“AI is just moving faster than the organizational processes,” Levi said.
Managers are also changing how they judge staff. About 78% said they now evaluate employees differently, giving more weight to prompt writing, choosing which tasks to hand to AI, and trying new ways of working.
The survey found that 46% of managers use AI to help inform their decisions. Another 39% of leaders use AI to draft performance reviews.
Research has shown that AI models can carry bias. A paper from early 2025 found AI models can be biased against Black male candidates. Levi said companies have yet to work out how to handle such issues.
More Tools and AI Agents to Manage
The software itself is getting harder to manage. About 57% of managers said their organizations now have more tools than before, and about 51% said their tools have become more interdependent.
Only 29% described their AI setup as fully optimized and centralized. Levi said businesses expected AI to shrink their software stacks, but the number of tools has grown instead.
“More than 50% are saying that they’re using more tools now than they did last year, and it’s not stopping,” Levi said.
The report also points to a new layer of “invisible labor.” Someone has to decide which tasks go to AI agents, check their work, and step in when something goes wrong.
About 35% of respondents said they fear being held responsible for decisions made by AI. Levi said managers do not want their agents to be fully autonomous and want people involved in key decisions.
Looking ahead, 58% of managers expect to oversee more AI agents than human employees within the next year. Another 46% said they worry about losing control over those agents’ actions.
