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

Companies are giving employees AI tools to make them more productive, but the tools appear to be creating new problems for their managers.

More than half of senior leaders say they find it harder to evaluate employees’ work after adopting AI, according to a Nielsen survey of 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries, commissioned by work-management company Monday.com. The reason is that much of employees’ output now arrives polished in the manager’s inbox, making it hard to tell how much came from the employee and how much from AI. As a result, nearly half of managers say they spend more time reviewing and guiding their teams’ output than they used to.

That’s not to say managers are unhappy about AI. Quite the opposite, in fact: 94% of the managers polled said they were excited to improve work using AI, and many are confident they know where to use it to get the most value. Michal Miller Levi, head of market research and customer insights at Monday.com, compared the enthusiasm to the early days of the internet in the 2000s, saying people see a similar kind of “magic” to AI.

But the problem, she told TechCrunch, is simply that AI is developing faster than companies can adapt. “AI works very well for [managers] individually, but they also have a different role as managers. They need to drive the organization as well […] Their struggle is [due to] the fact that AI is just moving faster than the organizational processes,” Levi said.

Managers are also reconsidering how they judge their teams: 78% of respondents said they have changed how they evaluate employees after adopting AI, placing greater weight on how well staff can create prompts, decide which tasks to delegate to AI, and experiment with new ways of working.

When I asked Levi whether using AI to weigh in on people’s performance could introduce outside bias into the process, she said companies have yet to work out how to handle such issues.

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