5 Ways AI Is Undermining Employee Engagement And What To Do About It

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.

AI can be great for many things at work: handling mundane tasks, increasing efficiency and helping us prioritize the work that genuinely requires a human touch. At the same time, a mounting body of evidence suggests that AI is driving an employee engagement crisis that threatens the future of work.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study in Behavioral Sciences found that employee-AI collaboration in the workplace can increase feelings of loneliness, exacerbating emotional fatigue and leading to behaviors that directly erode engagement at work. Employees sense it too. Over half of all workers are worried, and 33% across all age groups (40% among 18- to 29-year-olds) are overwhelmed, about how AI will impact the future of work, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey of U.S. workers.

Leaders who blindly push AI adoption risk massively weakening the core drivers of employee engagement: growth opportunities, interpersonal skills, human connection and purpose. Here are five ways AI is eroding employee engagement, and what conscientious leaders can do about it.

AI Is Blocking Career Growth For Young Professionals

Consistent with Pew Research findings, a 2024 Deloitte survey of 1,874 workers from the U.S., Canada, India and Australia revealed that young professionals are more likely than tenured workers to express concerns about AI at work. The top concerns (even over the risk of their jobs being replaced by AI) were a lack of training and fewer opportunities for on-the-job learning.

Deloitte found that early-career employees (and tenured workers) struggle to find mentorship at work. With everyone stretched thin, younger workers lack the mentorship needed to develop people skills and understand workplace dynamics. This weaker foundation makes them less competitive for future opportunities and ultimately creates more work for everyone around them. When these concerns are top of mind, employee engagement suffers.

What leaders can do: Strengthen team integration during the first 90 days for new hires, especially young professionals. Protect time for all employees to provide and receive mentorship (including “reverse mentoring,” where younger workers mentor more senior colleagues), rather than assuming it will happen organically. With workloads as they are, it won’t.

Employees Are Overloaded

According to a 2025 McKinsey survey of 1,993 participants in 105 nations across industries, company sizes, functions and tenures, 32% of respondents predict an overall workforce reduction of 3% of more in their organizations because of AI. With smaller teams and the same (or even higher) expectations for output, the work each remaining team member must carry is likely to increase.

Roles and responsibilities will broaden, and each team member will get pulled into more meetings and decisions than before. The added context-switching between working with people and working with AI creates a strain on top of hefty workloads. When employees are continually stressed and overloaded, engagement suffers.

What leaders can do: If you’re a decision-maker in a company cutting headcount because of AI adoption, leverage the cost savings to decrease workload for the remaining team members. Budget for an entry-level hire to relieve pressure on the team without eroding the overall gains to the bottom line. Implement protected focus time and meeting-free days for all team members. If people feel they are making progress and having an actual impact at work, employee engagement will bounce back.

AI Is Making Work Overly Transactional

With more AI (especially AI agents) in the workplace and leaner teams, team culture runs the risk of becoming more transactional. Team members who become too reliant on AI may find it harder to interact with colleagues. When there’s no need to be civil to AI, people skills are at risk of atrophying.

With AI streamlining tasks that once provided small, spontaneous moments for human interaction, levity and bonding, colleagues will drift apart, fail to connect with each other in the first place or lose their sense of purpose and meaning. And alienation is the antithesis of engagement.

What leaders can do: Implement weekly or monthly meaning-making practices during team meetings (e.g., having team members share what brought them to the work they do). Hold regular town halls and off-sites to build bonds across the company. Redefine purpose around what humans uniquely contribute. Celebrate human growth and wins (including learning through failure) over efficiency- and productivity-based achievements.

AI Collaboration Is Fueling Workplace Loneliness

Some of the impacts of AI adoption in the workplace fall squarely into the category of “counterproductive work behaviors,” as revealed in a 2025 academic article, “Effects of Employee–Artificial Intelligence (AI) Collaboration on Counterproductive Work Behaviors (CWBs): Leader Emotional Support as a Moderator.”

Researchers discovered that using AI at work can increase isolation and loneliness, exacerbating emotional fatigue, leading to genuinely damaging behaviors like absenteeism, tardiness, personal attacks, harassment, theft and destruction of company property.

What leaders can do: Create more opportunities for employees to interact and bond in social, non-work-related ways. Track and measure team connections and the strength of team relationships alongside productivity. Provide or allow reimbursement for mental health support and coaching so employees can develop their own antidotes to loneliness and isolation before resorting to conduct that harms the organization.

AI Is Jeopardizing Mission-Critical Human Skills

Even as AI proliferates, two-thirds of employees expect human skills to matter more in the next two years, as uncovered by a 2025 Deloitte survey on the impact of AI use on teams (Deloitte surveyed 1,394 employees across industries, functions, seniority and organization sizes).

The problem is that only 42% of employees strongly agree that their organizations place equal emphasis on developing human and technical skills, as reported in “Deloitte Report: Human Skills Drive High-Performing Teams in the AI Era.” Without adequate support and signaling from senior leadership that human capabilities are just as—if not more—important than technical skills, employees are liable to lose the ability to give and receive feedback, navigate and manage workplace conflict, build consensus and problem solve. These deficits will hurt employee engagement.

What leaders can do: Invest in professional and leadership development, specifically around human skills. Make interpersonal skill-building explicit, valued and rewarded by integrating it into everyone’s training and growth plans.

Protecting Employee Engagement As AI Transforms Work

Growth opportunities, human connection and interpersonal capabilities drive employee engagement, which, in turn, jeopardizes the fiscal bottom line. When AI adoption undermines these drivers, employee engagement suffers and work becomes demoralizing and painful for everyone.

But it’s not all bad news. All these problems are solvable. Conscientious leaders who invest in learning and development, protect time for human connection and track engagement alongside productivity will reap the benefits of AI adoption without sacrificing their people or their mid- and long-term bottom line.