Glonce

Glassdoor: worker AI sentiment falls from 81% to 43% since 2019

researchThe Glonce editorsThe Decoder🔥64Glonce rating64Impact55Novelty60Relevance88Surprise48Players48Credibility82
Glassdoor: worker AI sentiment falls from 81% to 43% since 2019

Glassdoor analyzed employer reviews left by US workers and found that positive sentiment toward AI on the job fell from 81 percent in 2019 to 43 percent by mid-2026, while negative comments rose to 53 percent. AI mentions in US reviews jumped 240 percent between May 2025 and May 2026, and the complaints go well beyond fear of losing a job.

The split by role is wide. The article's body text names executives as by far the most AI-positive group, while its own key-points summary instead credits managers with that spot, an inconsistency the source does not resolve. Software architects mention AI more than any other role and rate it mostly positively. Software engineers, whose work centers on writing and reviewing code, are far more skeptical, with 57 percent of their comments skewing negative. Insurance claims workers rate their employers' AI efforts almost entirely negative, typically blaming management for forcing buggy tools on them, and writers, accountants and customer service reps lean critical by a four-to-one ratio. Roles AI barely touches, like butchers or electricians, rarely mention it at all, but once a role has moderate AI exposure, AI comments turn up across nearly every profession regardless of how much automation actually threatens that job.

Most detailed positive reviews come from just two groups: 44 percent from workers at companies that benefit from the AI boom, and 41 percent from workers praising their employer's AI tools, training and support. About 27 percent of positive reviews are generic with no real detail. Negative reviews are more varied: 20 percent cite fear of job loss, the single most common complaint but far from the only one; 14 percent say their company forces them to use AI; 13 percent see AI as a distraction from the core business or as something that degrades the customer experience; 10 percent call internal AI use alienating, pointing to workplace surveillance or automated messages from management; and 8 percent call their bosses' productivity expectations unrealistic. About 10 percent of negative comments actually complain that their company is too slow to adopt AI or will not provide the right tools, meaning those workers are pro-AI in spirit.

The gender and generational splits are stark. Men rate AI positively 45 percent of the time versus 32 percent for women. By generation, Gen X is most receptive at 47 percent positive, Millennials come in at 40 percent, and Gen Z overall at 33 percent. Within Gen Z the gender gap widens further: only 21 percent of Gen Z women's AI comments are positive, against 42 percent for Gen Z men. Among Gen X workers, Glassdoor's analysis says the gender gap can be explained by differences in industry and occupation; for Gen Z, it says that explanation does not hold at all.

At the industry level, tech workers mention AI most often, with positive and negative comments roughly balanced. Media and communications workers also bring it up frequently but lean more critical, and workers in arts and nonprofit organizations hold the most negative views of any sector. Company size tracks with negativity too: at firms with fewer than 200 employees, 51 percent of AI comments are negative, rising to 67 percent at companies with more than 10,000 workers.

Glassdoor reviews are not a representative sample of the whole US workforce, and workers who are unhappy tend to leave reviews more often than satisfied ones, so the article treats the shift over time as more telling than the raw numbers, provided the platform's own negativity bias has stayed roughly constant across the years. It also places the findings alongside other work: an April survey of US adults found Gen Z particularly critical of AI, and a separate Anthropic study found overall skepticism among US workers, especially around skill erosion and job losses. Stanford's AI Index 2026 documents a related perception gap, with 73 percent of US experts rating AI's impact on the job market as positive against just 23 percent of the public.

Key facts

  • Positive AI sentiment among US workers fell from 81% in 2019 to 43% by mid-2026, negative comments rose to 53%, and AI mentions in reviews jumped 240% from May 2025 to May 2026.
  • Only 21% of Gen Z women's AI comments are positive versus 42% of Gen Z men's; overall, men rate AI positively 45% of the time versus 32% for women.
  • Software engineers are far more skeptical than software architects, with 57% of engineers' comments skewing negative, while insurance claims workers, writers, accountants and customer service reps lean critical by roughly four-to-one.
  • Company size tracks with negativity: 51% of AI comments are negative at firms under 200 employees, rising to 67% at companies with more than 10,000 workers.
  • Fear of job loss drives only 20% of negative comments; being forced to use AI (14%), workplace surveillance or automated messaging (10%) and unrealistic productivity demands (8%) account for much of the rest.

Why it matters

This is a rare longitudinal read on how AI feels to the people using it day to day, not to the executives deciding to deploy it. The headline number, a drop from 81 percent positive in 2019 to 43 percent by mid-2026 alongside a 240 percent jump in how often AI even comes up in reviews, says employee sentiment is not just cooling, it is actively souring as exposure grows. The most common negative theme is not job loss but being handed tools that do not work well or being told how to use them, a distinction with direct implications for how companies plan AI rollouts.

Who it affects

Nearly every occupation now weighs in once AI reaches it. Executives (called managers elsewhere in the same source) and software architects stay positive, software engineers turn skeptical over code-focused AI tools, and insurance claims workers, writers, accountants and customer service reps are the most critical, largely over buggy or mandated tools. The generational and gender split is sharper still: Gen X is the most receptive age group, and while men and women overall differ by 13 points, the gap explodes among the youngest workers, where Gen Z women are the single most AI-skeptical group Glassdoor identifies. Employees at large companies, and workers in media, arts and nonprofit roles, report more negativity than those at small firms or in tech.

How to use it

The data marks out two routes to genuine employee enthusiasm about AI: working somewhere that is visibly winning because of AI, or getting real tools, training and support rather than a mandate. Reviews with neither ingredient tend to read as vague praise. On the negative side, the largest fixable driver is not fear of replacement but avoidable friction, forced adoption, unreliable tools, surveillance-flavored monitoring and unrealistic output targets, all of which point at rollout design and management behavior rather than the technology itself. A tenth of negative reviews even complain their employer is too slow on AI, so the underlying appetite for the technology has not disappeared.

How solid is it

Glassdoor's own analysts caveat their data directly: reviews are not representative of the whole workforce and unhappy workers post more often than satisfied ones, so the article leans on the multi-year trend rather than the absolute percentages, on the assumption that this selection bias has stayed roughly steady over time. The source's own text is inconsistent on one point, naming both 'managers' and 'executives' as the most AI-positive group without reconciling the two. The broader picture is corroborated elsewhere: a separate April survey found Gen Z particularly critical of AI, an Anthropic study found comparable overall worker skepticism centered on skill erosion and job loss, and Stanford's AI Index 2026 documents a matching gap between expert and public optimism about AI's effect on jobs.

Risks and caveats

The article does not disclose the size of the Glassdoor review sample, how comments were classified as positive or negative, or the exact date range the analysis covers within 2019 to 2026. No analyst or Glassdoor employee is named or quoted, so the findings arrive as a company-level summary rather than an inspectable dataset. Beyond the managers-versus-executives inconsistency noted above, the piece gives no precise negative-sentiment percentage for insurance claims workers, writers, accountants or customer service reps, only qualitative language and a four-to-one ratio. Correlation between company size and negativity is reported without an explanation for why larger employers see more critical AI reviews.