More AI, Less Engagement: What Companies Are Missing

The Gallup Report 2026 Sends a Clear Warning

I read Gallup’s annual report with great interest every year. This year, at first, I felt like I was seeing many familiar developments. But two numbers really stayed with me.

Gallup always places a strong focus on employee engagement in its report, so let’s take a closer look at what the latest findings tell us.

According to the current report, global employee engagement has fallen from 23% in 2022 to just 20% today.

At first glance, three percentage points may not seem like much. But when you apply that difference to the global workforce, the picture changes dramatically. Suddenly, we’re talking about more than 100 million employees – more people than the entire population of Germany.

Two numbers in particular made me stop while reading the Gallup report. They didn’t just make me think. I find the development behind them genuinely alarming.

73% of European employees are not engaged at work.

And:

48% say they are currently struggling in their lives.

That puts Europe at the bottom of all regions worldwide when it comes to employee engagement.

And that’s not all. Negative emotions increased significantly around the world during the pandemic. While they have declined from their peaks, they remain elevated compared with pre-2020 levels. According to the report, this could point either to lasting psychological effects or to a new and more challenging baseline.

This was the point where I stopped for a moment. Because to me, the crucial question isn’t simply that engagement is declining. It’s why more and more people are losing the sense that their work is meaningful and that they are making a contribution.

Why are employees no longer feeling that sense of purpose? In my view, their connection to their colleagues and, as a result, to the company itself, plays a major role in engagement.

You can download the full study here.

 

Why Is Employee Engagement Declining?

When we talk to our customers, we rarely hear them say they have an engagement or motivation problem. Phenomena such as fake work or quiet quitting show that a lack of engagement can go unnoticed for a long time and often has deeper underlying causes. The Gallup figures make it clear that motivation is eroding and eventually, that has consequences.

I’m convinced that many companies don’t actually have an engagement problem. They have a connection problem.

Our customers are aware that there is a connection problem, but they often don’t know why. After all, their employees spend a lot of time in meetings talking to one another and yet, somehow, that doesn’t seem to be enough.

Especially in large, global organizations with multiple locations, employees outside their own departments often barely know one another. There is little sense of “we.” As a result, valuable knowledge remains trapped in silos, costing companies efficiency and, in the worst case, their ability to innovate.

We see another recurring pattern in onboarding. Once the formal onboarding phase is over, many companies have no real plan for what comes next. A new employee may be fully up to speed from a professional perspective, yet still struggle to build personal connections within the organization.

Another very current challenge is AI. Many companies are introducing artificial intelligence and expecting employees to use it in their day-to-day work. But most employees only have a basic understanding of AI and don’t know who they can learn from internally.

At this point, you may be wondering why I’ve listed all these examples. At first glance, these challenges may not seem to have much in common. In reality, they all come down to the same question:

Do people within an organization actually know the right people to turn to when they need support, knowledge, or guidance?

Engagement doesn’t emerge because companies keep launching new programs or introducing AI. It emerges when people feel connected, learn from one another, and know who they can turn to.

Gallup makes an important point here: people experience greater well-being when they find their work meaningful and feel that it contributes to something beyond themselves. That’s why I’m convinced that relationships aren’t a “soft factor.” They are one of the foundations that allow engagement to develop in the first place.

 

AI Makes Employees More Productive. So Why Isn’t It Making Companies More Productive?

One section of the report particularly caught my attention: the use of AI in the workplace.

Gallup repeatedly points to an interesting contradiction: AI may increase individual productivity, but so far, very little of that seems to translate into productivity gains at the organizational level.

An NBER study came to a similar conclusion: 89% of executives reported seeing no real impact from AI adoption on employee productivity. So far, AI clearly hasn’t delivered the productivity gains many organizations were hoping for.

One thing I keep seeing in connection with this rather sobering finding is that companies invest in AI tools first and only then in the people who are expected to use them.

With AI in particular, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it is inherently easy to use. After all, the software is intelligent and tells you what it needs. Or at least, that’s often the assumption.

After their first few attempts with ChatGPT or Claude, most people quickly realize that the quality of the prompt has a major impact on the quality of the result.

Taking a Course Doesn’t Make You AI-Proficient

Some companies have already recognized this challenge and are offering AI courses to their employees.

In our recent study on employee development, we found that formal learning formats such as online courses, seminars, and workshops remain the most commonly offered development opportunities.

 

In my view, however, that approach is not sufficient. These formats are important, but they often remain isolated interventions focused primarily on transferring knowledge at a specific point in time. Without exchange, application, and repetition, even high-quality learning content quickly loses its impact.

AI adds another challenge: everything is developing incredibly quickly. An AI course that is relevant today may already be outdated six months from now.

These courses are therefore a good starting point, but on their own, they are unlikely to deliver the long-term productivity gains companies are hoping for.

Why Isn’t Training Alone Enough?

In my experience, real progress rarely comes from adding another tool. It comes from people learning from one another.

The well-known 70-20-10 model reminds us that most workplace learning doesn’t happen in seminars. It happens in the flow of work – through experience and through interaction with other people.

Yet our study found that the informal formats designed to encourage exactly this kind of exchange are among the least commonly offered.

AI is evolving faster than traditional learning programs can keep up. The real challenge, therefore, isn’t teaching every employee exactly the same content. It’s making sure they always know who they can learn from.

That’s why I believe companies should be investing much more heavily in employee-to-employee knowledge exchange right now.

 

What Can Companies Do Now?

Let’s take a closer look at the companies that successfully navigate change and make progress. In my view, some clear patterns emerge. Unfortunately, these patterns are often overlooked, which is exactly why I want to share them with you in this edition.

Create Opportunities for Connection

Relationships no longer form automatically in the office. Remote work, global teams, and hybrid collaboration have fundamentally changed how people interact over the past few years. It’s increasingly common for colleagues to never meet in person or even to be unaware that the other person exists.

That makes it all the more important for companies to proactively create opportunities for employees to connect. Not only to strengthen company culture and employee engagement, but also to help knowledge reach the people who need it.

Treat Learning as a Continuous Process

The results of our study clearly show that companies still rely heavily on one-off learning initiatives. But as the saying goes, we never stop learning. That applies just as much to our working lives.

Learning doesn’t happen twice a year in a seminar room. It happens every day – through new tasks, new experiences, and conversations with colleagues. The more learning becomes part of everyday work, the greater its long-term impact and the more effectively organizations can build an innovative learning culture.

Successful global companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte have already recognized this and invest in peer learning circles, mentoring programs, and talent development initiatives.

Make Knowledge Visible

Knowledge silos (and the inefficiencies and duplicated work they create) cost companies significant amounts of money every year. But often, the problem isn’t that specialized knowledge is being deliberately withheld. Employees simply don’t know who the internal experts are.

That expertise might relate to a very specific customer case, for example, or to research into a new pharmaceutical compound.

So there’s one thing I strongly recommend to every organization: make your experts visible.

How companies do that is ultimately secondary. Some use expert directories, others rely on communities, mentoring, or matching platforms. What matters to me is simple: employees need to be able to quickly find the people who can help them.

One side note: I believe this will become particularly important in the context of AI over the next few years.

Think of Leadership as Connection

In conversations with leaders, I hear the same sentence again and again: “I’d like to provide more support, but I simply don’t have the time.”

At the same time, employees are often reluctant to “bother” their manager with a small question. The result can be that certain tasks are delayed, completed incorrectly, or not completed at all.

That’s why I recommend that companies think less hierarchically. Not every question needs to be answered by a manager. In most cases, there are other colleagues within the organization who can provide the answer just as quickly.

Part of a leader’s role, therefore, is to make sure people within their teams and departments connect with one another. That way, employees learn where different areas of expertise sit within the organization and can help one another quickly and informally when questions arise.

 

Relationships Need Structure

When I look at the Gallup report alongside our own study, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: we won’t solve the biggest workplace challenges of the coming years through new technology or more learning content alone.

The more AI changes the way we work, the more important it becomes for organizations to share knowledge quickly, provide orientation, and connect people with one another.

In my view, this is also where sustainable employee engagement develops. Not because employees complete another training course, but because they experience what it means to learn from one another and know that they don’t have to figure everything out on their own.

That’s why I think we need to rethink the question of how learning works within organizations.

Less: “What content do we need to teach?”

And more: “How do we create an environment where learning happens naturally every day?”

This is where I see formats such as mentoring, peer learning, and topic-specific communities playing an important role. Not because they replace traditional training, but because they add what is often missing from everyday work: continuous exchange, guidance, and genuine human connection.

Our study also showed that mentoring in particular remains significantly underestimated as a development tool. Many people still associate mentoring primarily with career advancement. I see it much more broadly today.

I recently explored this idea in a Workplace in Focus episode as well. In it, I look at the connection between mentoring and employee retention – and why mentoring can have an impact that goes far beyond traditional employee development.

Take a look at the episode here:

 

 

Conclusion

If there’s one key takeaway I have from the latest Gallup report, it’s this: employee engagement isn’t a goal that can be achieved through a single initiative. It’s the result of a company culture in which people can find guidance, learn from one another, and build genuine relationships.

Right now, as artificial intelligence transforms our working lives more profoundly than almost any other development, I believe this human factor is becoming even more important. Technology can accelerate processes and make knowledge more accessible, but it cannot replace what makes organizations successful: trust, exchange, and the ability to learn together.

Perhaps we should spend less time talking about how to increase employee engagement and more time asking what conditions we need to create for engagement to emerge in the first place.

Because ultimately, sustainable progress doesn’t come from individual programs or new technologies. It comes from people – and the relationships they build with one another.

 

 

 

Sources

• Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026
• NBER study
• Mystery Minds Employee Development Study 2026