1,700 senior managers in Monday's survey say AI makes evaluating work harder

TechCrunch covered a Monday.com and Nielsen survey of 1,700 directors and senior managers across seven countries on how AI has changed middle management. The company that paid for the survey sells work-management software, so read the numbers with that in mind. The sample size and the methodology sit on the record.

The numbers in the piece

Three figures measure how managers use AI themselves. 94 percent describe themselves as enthusiastic about the technology. 46 percent say they use AI to inform decisions. 39 percent say they use AI to draft performance reviews.

Three more measure the strain on management work. 78 percent say they have changed how they evaluate the team's output since AI showed up in it. Over 50 percent find evaluating that work harder than it used to be. 57 percent report that their teams now use more tools than they did a year ago.

Two forward-looking figures round it out. 58 percent of managers expect to oversee more AI agents than human employees within a year. 46 percent are worried about losing control over what the agents do.

Michal Miller Levi at Monday.com is quoted in the piece: "AI works very well for them individually, but they also have a different role as managers."

The gap the data points at

The individual gain is the one managers feel. 94 percent enthusiastic reads as a group that likes the tools. The structural problem is also theirs: more than half say the step they now spend time on, which is evaluating what the team has shipped, is harder than it used to be.

That is a change in the shape of management work. The old job was reading output and judging quality. The new job also includes reading output, judging quality, and working out whether the writer is a person on the team or a model the person pointed at. The survey does not break out how managers are solving this, which is the gap in it. 39 percent drafting reviews with AI is one answer: push the writing task back onto the same tool and spend the reclaimed time somewhere else.

What a team should take from this

A product leader planning next quarter around AI-assisted output has one more piece of evidence that review capacity is the current bottleneck. Writing capacity has already moved past it on most of these teams. The teams that already produce more draft work than their reviewers can absorb will keep making their reviewers slower, which shows up as late sign-off on everything else.

Two caveats. The survey was commissioned by a vendor whose product helps managers evaluate team work, so the problem it names is one the sponsor can sell against. And a survey of senior managers in seven countries reports how those managers feel about the change. Measuring what has happened to review cycle time and defect rate takes a different kind of study. For now the Monday and Nielsen figures are the current data a team can quote.

Source

TechCrunch: AI promises productivity, but for managers it's mostly a headache for now, says new survey, reporting on a survey from Monday.com and Nielsen.