AI Makes Employee Reviews Harder as Managers Lose Control of Tool Sprawl
A Nielsen survey finds AI complicates employee reviews, expands software stacks and leaves managers overseeing agents while fearing bias and lost control.
Summary
A Nielsen survey of 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries, commissioned by Monday.com, found more than half struggle to evaluate employees after adopting AI because polished output obscures each worker’s contribution. Nearly half spend more time reviewing and guiding work. Despite this, 94% are excited about improving work with AI, and many believe they know where it delivers value. Monday.com market research and customer insights chief Michal Miller Levi compared that enthusiasm to the internet’s perceived magic in the 2000s, but said AI is advancing faster than organizational processes.
Seventy-eight percent have changed employee evaluations, emphasizing prompt creation, task delegation to AI and experimentation. However, 46% use AI to inform decisions and 39% use it to draft performance reviews. The Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research found in 2026 that, without objective standards and when rating people independently, large language models assess performance similarly to humans. An early 2025 paper found bias against Black male candidates and biases varying across social groups. Levi said companies have not resolved how to manage such risks.
AI supervision also creates invisible labor as managers assign, inspect and correct agents. Fifty-seven percent report more tools, 51% report greater interdependence and clustering, and only 29% have fully optimized, centralized AI infrastructure. Businesses expecting consolidation after 2025 instead face additional apps, integrations and shadow AI. Within a year, 58% expect to oversee more AI agents than employees, 46% fear losing control of agents and 35% fear responsibility for AI decisions. Managers want human involvement in crucial choices, making governance and infrastructure prerequisites for productivity.
Positives
- 94% of managers are excited about using AI to improve work, with many confident about where it can create value.
- 78% have updated employee evaluations to recognize prompting, appropriate AI delegation and experimentation.
- 29% describe their AI infrastructure as fully optimized and centralized, showing some organizations have established mature systems.
- Managers want humans consulted on crucial tasks and decisions rather than granting AI agents full autonomy.
Risks & concerns
- More than half of senior leaders find employee performance harder to evaluate because polished AI output obscures individual contributions.
- Nearly half spend more time reviewing and guiding team output after adopting AI.
- 39% use AI to draft performance reviews despite unresolved risks of reproducing human and demographic biases.
- 57% report more software tools, 51% report greater interdependence, and shadow AI is expanding outside approved systems.
- 58% expect to oversee more AI agents than employees within a year, while 46% fear losing control of their actions.
- 35% fear being held responsible for AI decisions, creating accountability concerns around unpredictable models.