AI Tools Bring Managers More Oversight Work, Survey Finds

Companies are handing employees AI tools to boost productivity, but a new survey suggests the technology is piling new work onto managers. More than half of senior leaders say judging employees' work has become harder since AI arrived, according to a Nielsen poll of 1,700 directors and senior managers in seven countries, commissioned by work-management firm Monday.com. Output now lands in managers' inboxes already polished, so it's tough to tell how much an employee did and how much the AI did. Nearly half of managers say they spend more time reviewing and guiding their teams' output than before.

That doesn't mean they're sour on AI. Ninety-four percent said they were excited to improve work with it, and many feel confident about where it delivers the most value. Michal Miller Levi, Monday.com's head of market research and customer insights, likened the enthusiasm to the early internet days of the 2000s. The trouble, she told TechCrunch, is that AI is moving faster than companies can adapt. It works well for managers individually, she said, but their role also means driving the organization, and their struggle stems from AI outpacing organizational processes.

Managers are rethinking how they judge staff, too: 78% said they've changed their evaluation approach since adopting AI, weighting things like prompt-writing, deciding which tasks to delegate to AI, and experimenting with new ways of working. Fairness questions linger, though. Forty-six percent of managers use AI to help inform decisions, and 39% of leaders use it to draft performance reviews. Levi acknowledged companies haven't worked out how to handle the bias such practices could introduce.

The manager's day is shifting as well. Someone must choose which tasks go to AI agents, check the output, and step in when things go wrong-supervision the report calls a possible new layer of invisible labor. Software is getting harder to manage: 57% of managers say their organizations have more tools in circulation than before, about 51% say tools have grown more interdependent, and only 29% describe their AI infrastructure as fully optimized and centralized. Levi said businesses expected AI to shrink their software stacks, but instead they're juggling more apps, integrations and shadow AI.

Control is becoming more pressing as companies deploy agents that act on their own. Fifty-eight percent of managers expect to oversee more AI agents than human employees within a year, and 46% worry about losing control over what those agents do. Thirty-five percent fear being held responsible for AI-made decisions. Levi said managers don't want agents fully autonomous-they want people consulted on crucial tasks. The findings suggest AI adoption is as much a governance problem as a productivity opportunity, with managers scrambling to keep things running without proper processes and infrastructure.