Workplace AI Is Crushing Employee Mental Health

Companies worldwide are going to pump close to $100 billion into workplace wellness next year. 

It’s not working.

There’s a certain callousness in an employer giving an employee free access to a wellness app to fix the damage caused by the very same employer crushing that very same employee’s soul every morning.

But it seems like that’s exactly what’s going on. 

Look, I’m not one to scoff at what are very likely good corporate intentions to improve employee mental health with wellness programs, mental health apps, and additional individual resources. I mean, I’m sure a lot of it is being done in the name of enhanced productivity – after all, a happy worker is a productive worker. But a perk is a perk, right?

I’m just not a fan of putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg. Or releasing the wellness puppy to lift everyone’s spirits while ignoring the big ol’ sadness elephant in the room. Or whatever metaphor I can mangle to get to the root cause of all this employee unhappiness.

Maybe we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Here’s an idea.

The Workplace Hit Peak Toxic in 2024

I don’t care what side of what battle you’re on. I really don’t.

The overwhelming majority of people in the workplace – labor and management, maker and seller, corporate and startup, in-office and remote, hell, left and right – we’re all beyond exhausted fighting one battle after another when we should be making and selling widgets. 

A little over a year ago, I slapped together a pretty solid list of reasons why the toxicity levels in your average workplace were becoming unhealthy: From mass layoffs, those both caused by AI and not caused by AI to, well, AI workplace stress as its own reason, to return-to-office mandates that turned into performative theater, to the entry of Gen Z into a workplace that seemed to resent them, to a general tech malaise that reduced satisfaction in return for ever-increasing friction. 

I think I nailed it!

That wasn’t just a rant. I’ve been at this whole business and tech rodeo long enough to see the patterns as they’re developing and repeating. They always repeat.

As 2024 turned into 2025, Gallup warned employers about the uptick to about half of employees either struggling or suffering at work. At the same time, Gartner was raising the alarm on the serious business risk of employee “loneliness,” while warning employers not to screw up their AI implementations by forcing them onto their workforce.

Then as 2025 rolled on, employers ignored all that advice and forced AI onto everyone they didn’t fire.

Um… I can connect these dots.

Depressed? There’s An App For That!

We’re still not to the point as a society where we give depression the weight of consideration it’s due.

I don’t want to be callous myself here, but it seems like a lot of employers plowed ahead with a numbers-are-everything short term growth strategy that left a lot of employees either out to dry or out of the picture entirely. And then the employers said:

“Have you tried Calm? I love Calm. Changed my life. Here. We’ll give it to you for free. I know it’s a trojan-horse market share thing for them but a perk is a perk, right?”

And again. I don’t mean to dismiss an act of kindness, and I don’t even mean to pick on Calm. That app is a good thing. And I’m not saying that a lot of employers aren’t taking employee morale and mental health seriously.

But seriously? 

There are symptoms and there are root causes. 

$100 Billion on Human Wellness << $1.5 Trillion on AI Productivity

And there are drops and there are buckets.

If you’re a business leader, you’ve got to ask yourself if you’re lighting money on fire on both sides of the equation.

Employers are treating high stress and low morale with apps and programs, while creating higher stress and lower morale via forced AI adoption, leading to employee concerns over being replaced by the very tools they no longer trust but are being mandated to implement. This, in turn, dilutes the very productivity gains being sought by the company when adopting AI, which makes the company just add more AI to get more diluted productivity gains. 

It’s a vicious cycle, and it needs to stop. 

I’m not going to tell you if, when, and how to implement generative, prescriptive, agentic, predictive, or autonomous AI. I’ve been working with these tools for 15 years and… let’s just say that’s at least another 20 posts. 

I will say that the generative AI hype cycle is winding down, not as quickly or aggressively as it spun up, but I think we’re finally seeing the majority of the mainstream public having their “Hey… wait a minute” moment on AI being sold as a magic thinking computer that can do everything we ask it to do.

That opens the door for employers to fix some mistakes, slow some rolls, and take an entirely new approach to figuring out how this neat new evolution of a technology that’s been with us for over 50 years can produce some real gains in productivity without automatically trying to replace 100 humans with one robot.

In other words, far more thought needs to go into the integration of these tools into the organization. Anyone who has been in tech long enough to claim 15 years experience with anything will tell you that there are no magic bullets, no thinking computers, and no hidden value in digital assets that only a few forward-thinking people can see. 

If the industry doesn’t start addressing the value of the human side of their tech, and caring for that value as people instead of numbers, they’re going to get exactly what they want: AI producing AI that sells AI to AI. 

And the scary thing is, to some people at least, that doesn’t sound completely silly. 

If this made you think to yourself “Hey… wait a minute,” please join my email list and I’ll hit you up with a brief email when I’m published.