New Gallup Report Says AI Is Changing Work but Not Fixing the Workplace
In its State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, Gallup says worker engagement fell again in 2025 as managers struggled and AI gains failed to reach the bottom line
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Global employee engagement fell for a second straight year in 2025, dropping to 20%, its lowest level since 2020, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report. The report argues that while companies continue pouring money into artificial intelligence, the bigger workplace problem is managerial strain, weak adoption inside organisations and a disconnect between individual productivity gains and company-wide results.
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Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the global economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity last year, equal to 9% of global GDP. Global job-market sentiment improved slightly to 52% in 2025, but that recovery was modest and still below the 2019 peak. At the same time, employee wellbeing ticked up to 34% thriving, the first improvement in three years, suggesting a labour market that is not collapsing but is still far from stable.
One of the report’s clearest findings is that the recent engagement slide is being driven largely by managers. Since 2022, manager engagement has fallen by nine percentage points, including a five-point drop between 2024 and 2025 alone. Companies may be investing in AI systems, but they are still underinvesting in the people expected to introduce, explain and normalise them inside teams.
Gallup identifies manager-led AI adoption as one of the top drivers of frequent AI use in the workplace, alongside technical integration. In U.S. organisations using AI, employees who strongly agree that their manager actively supports AI use are 98.7 times more likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done, and 97.4 times more likely to strongly agree that AI helps them do what they do best each day. Yet Gallup says fewer than a third of U.S. employees in AI-implementing organisations strongly agree that their manager actively supports their team’s use of the technology.
The report also draws a line between the global story and the North American one. In the United States and Canada, engagement remained comparatively high at 31%, but job-market confidence fell sharply to 47%, down ten points and below the global average. Gallup ranks the region second-to-last on job climate, while daily stress remained high at 50% and loneliness rose to 19%. That makes the regional picture harder to spin as simple resilience: workers may still be relatively engaged, but they are less confident about what comes next.
Europe tells a different story recording once again the lowest engagement in the world at 12%, even as job-market confidence stood at 57% and life evaluation rose to 49%. In other words, Europe’s workers are not the most optimistic about work itself, but they are not the most distressed about their wider lives either, suggesting that dissatisfaction with work does not always map neatly onto broader wellbeing.
The technology may be improving individual efficiency, but the report argues that those gains will remain limited unless organisations fix the human layer, manager capability, employee trust, team-level engagement and credible implementation.
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