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By Jordan Gunn
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According to Gallup's latest State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, worker engagement has fallen for the second year running, dropping to 20 percent in 2025—its lowest level since 2020. Engagement, in the report's terms, measures the psychological attachment workers feel to their work, their team and their employer.
An engaged workforce is a productive one. But with the looming threat of AI, job security has rarely felt more precarious, or people more replaceable.
The report digs into what is driving that disengagement, and what it costs, not just for employees but for the global economy. Gallup estimates that last year, low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity, or nine percent of global GDP.
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Not long ago, a career in tech, marketing or content creation felt like a safe bet. Now the ground has shifted again, and the value of human input feels like it’s declining. Junior roles are the most exposed: why hire an eager, energetic graduate when AI can do the job? And so the bottom rung gets cut. Senior staff might feel safe for now, but they have been told to use AI to boost their own productivity. The obvious question hangs in the air: once the powers that be realize AI has figured it all out, is there still a need for the senior employee either?
Gallup’s report does not draw that line directly. What it does find is that falling engagement among managers accounts for most of the recent downturn. Teams need engaged managers to do their best work. And while managers are the ones expected to drive AI adoption, engagement trickles down: managers need to feel secure themselves before they can promote ethical, effective and productive use of it. Industries that fail to build long-term strategies pairing people with AI will keep feeding the fear now visible almost everywhere.
Managers also need strong mental health support. As Tim Felton, a psychotherapist at Pleso, points out: “Leadership is typically evaluated based on results and the ability to guide teams. Far less attention is given to the psychological resources that make these behaviors possible.” Without the tools to support wellbeing, the impact is felt across the board.
AI is moving at a scale humans are struggling to keep up with, and this in turn is causing what's called “AI-induced anxiety”. It manifests in several ways. Workers are starting to worry their skills are obsolete, to question their worth and to struggle to see what their options are. Many are asking not if but when their job might be at risk. This reinforces the absolute necessity of ethical AI use, but also, as Felton notes, of strong psychological resources. Employers of every scale and industry need to be mindful of the toll AI can take, rather than brush it off as growing pains.
But like every great technology shift before it, it’s important to stay hopeful. Global engagement has dropped, yet the picture isn't bleak everywhere. In the US and Canada, engagement is holding steady at 31 percent, among the highest of any region and well above the 20 percent global average. This isn't a cause for celebration, but it does show there’s potential to claw back higher levels of engagement.
The tide might already be starting to turn. A growing body of research points to a countercurrent forming. Pew Research found that more than half of US adults are more concerned than excited about AI's growing role in daily life, and roughly three-quarters say it is important to be able to tell whether something was made by a person or a machine. Marketers have even coined a term for what comes next: “human premium”, the extra value people place on work when they know a human made it.
Plenty of researchers and commentators see the beginnings of a full-circle moment in this: a turn back toward the tangible, the personal and the human, warts and all. There's also a more realistic version: a future where AI works in tandem with people rather than against them, thereby freeing us up for the work only humans can do and building the best environments, powered by us, aided by AI. Either way, the same truth lies beneath it all. People still want to be part of something, and they want it to mean something too.
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