Over half of managers say AI makes it harder to judge staff work

More than half of managers say it is harder to evaluate employees' work since their companies adopted AI. A Nielsen survey of 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries, commissioned by work-management company Monday.com, found that polished work arrives in the inbox and it is hard to tell how much came from the person and how much from AI.

What the survey found

Managers are not down on AI. In the survey, 94% said they were excited to improve work with it. Still, nearly half say they spend more time reviewing and guiding their teams' output than before. Michal Miller Levi of Monday.com said the trouble is that AI is moving faster than company processes can adapt.

• 78% have changed how they evaluate employees since adopting AI.
• They now give more weight to prompting skill, choosing tasks to hand to AI, and trying new ways of working.
• 57% say their organizations have more tools in circulation than before.
• Only 29% call their AI setup fully optimized and centralized.

The fairness problem

The survey found that 46% of managers use AI to help inform their decisions, and 39% of leaders use it to draft performance reviews. That could add bias. AI language models predict text based on human patterns in their training data, so they can repeat human prejudices. A Luxembourg research institute found that, without clear objective standards, these models tend to rate performance much like humans do. A 2025 paper found AI models can be biased against black male candidates. Levi said companies have not yet worked out how to handle this.

More agents, more worry

AI agents are tools that can act on their own. The survey found that 58% of managers expect to oversee more AI agents than people within the next year. Of those surveyed, 46% worry about losing control over what the agents do, and 35% fear being held responsible for decisions made by AI. Levi said managers do not want fully autonomous agents. They want people consulted on crucial tasks.

The report also points to a new layer of invisible labor: someone must decide which tasks go to AI, check the results, and step in when something goes wrong. Employees using tools outside approved systems, often called shadow AI, adds to the load.

What to do

If your staff use AI, set clear rules on what to disclose and how you review their work before it affects performance reviews. If AI helps draft those reviews, a person should check them for fairness.