AI makes employee evaluation harder for more than half of surveyed managers

More than half of senior managers say evaluating employees became harder after their organizations adopted AI, according to a Nielsen survey of 1,700 directors and senior managers in seven countries commissioned by Monday.com.

Polished AI-assisted output can obscure an employee’s actual contribution. Nearly half of respondents said they now spend more time reviewing and guiding work, while 78% have changed evaluation criteria to emphasize prompting, task delegation and experimentation with AI.

Managers are also applying the technology to the evaluations themselves: 46% use AI to inform decisions and 39% use it to draft performance reviews. That can introduce another source of bias when criteria are unclear, because language models can reproduce patterns in training data rather than make accountable judgments.

The operational burden extends beyond reviews. Fifty-seven percent reported more software tools than before, only 29% described their AI infrastructure as fully optimized and centralized, and 58% expect to oversee more agents than human employees within a year. The survey captures manager perceptions, not a measured productivity loss, but it shows why adoption requires governance and traceable responsibility.