AI promises productivity, but for managers, it’s mostly a headache for now
TechCrunch Ram Iyer ● Covered by 5 sources
AI is making managers’ lives harder, not easier. They’re getting polished work they can’t easily judge, and now they’re using AI to judge the AI work.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Ram Iyer — read the original for the full story.
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Companies rolled out AI to help employees do more. Instead, a lot of managers have ended up with a new problem: figuring out what’s actually coming from the employee and what was assembled by a machine before it landed in the inbox.
That’s not a fringe complaint. In a Nielsen survey of 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries, commissioned by Monday.com, more than half of senior leaders said AI has made employee evaluation harder. Nearly half said they now spend more time reviewing and guiding team output than they did before.
The odd part is that the same managers are broadly sold on the technology. Ninety-four percent said they’re excited to improve work with AI, and 78% said they’ve already changed how they judge performance. Prompt-writing, deciding what to hand to AI, and experimenting with new workflows are getting more weight. Michal Miller Levi, who heads market research and customer insights at Monday.com, said the appeal feels a bit like the early internet boom in the 2000s: the “magic” is real, but companies are moving too slowly to absorb it. AI, in other words, is outrunning the org chart.
That mismatch is showing up inside reviews too. Forty-six percent of managers said they use AI to help inform decisions, and 39% said they use it to draft performance reviews. That creates a neat little loop of machine-assisted judgment judging machine-assisted work, with bias baked into the middle if nobody is paying attention. Researchers have already found that LLMs can mirror human rating patterns and can show significant bias against black male candidates.
And the software sprawl hasn’t gotten cleaner either. Fifty-seven percent of managers said their organizations now have more tools in circulation, about 51% said those tools have become more interdependent and clustered, and only 29% called their AI setup fully optimized and centralized. As AI agents arrive, the control issue gets sharper: 58% expect to oversee more agents than human employees within a year, while 46% worry about losing control over what those agents do. Productivity was supposed to be the headline. Governance is turning into the job.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when executives buy AI as a shortcut and then act surprised when the shortcut needs supervision. The real product here isn’t autonomy; it’s extra management work dressed up as progress. Very on-brand for enterprise software, honestly.
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