More than half of senior leaders say AI has made it harder to evaluate employees’ work, according to a Nielsen survey of 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries, commissioned by work-management company Monday.com. Because output now arrives polished, managers struggle to tell how much came from staff and how much from AI, and nearly half say they spend more time reviewing and guiding their teams as a result.
Enthusiasm remains high, with 94% of managers excited to improve work using AI. Michal Miller Levi, head of market research and customer insights at Monday.com, likened the excitement to the early internet era of the 2000s. She said the core challenge is that AI is advancing faster than organizational processes can adapt, leaving managers balancing their own AI use with their responsibility to guide the wider business.
Evaluation criteria are shifting too, as 78% of respondents said they now place more weight on prompting skills, deciding what to delegate to AI and experimenting with new ways of working. Managers are also leaning on AI themselves, with 46% using it to inform decisions and 39% using it to draft performance reviews. That raises concerns about bias, as research has shown large language models can reflect human patterns and biases from training data. Levi acknowledged companies have yet to work out how to address this.
The report describes supervising AI agents as a new layer of invisible labor. Tool sprawl is growing, with 57% reporting more tools in use and only 29% describing their AI infrastructure as fully optimized and centralized. Levi said businesses expected AI to shrink their software stacks, but tools and shadow AI usage have instead increased.
Looking ahead, 58% of managers expect to oversee more AI agents than human employees within a year, while 46% worry about losing control of those agents and 35% fear being held responsible for AI decisions. Levi said managers want humans kept involved in critical decisions rather than fully autonomous agents.
