The honeymoon is over. Glassdoor’s analysis of employer reviews shows U.S. workers have gone from broadly optimistic about AI to deeply skeptical in just seven years — positive sentiment cratered from 81 percent in 2019 to 43 percent by mid-2026, while negative comments climbed to 53 percent. The shift isn’t subtle, and it isn’t confined to any single corner of the workforce.
The complaints have moved well beyond the original anxiety about job loss. Yes, fear of being replaced remains the single largest concern at 20 percent of negative comments, but workers are now griping about being forced to use buggy tools (14 percent), watching AI degrade customer experience (13 percent), and feeling alienated by workplace surveillance or automated management messages (10 percent). Meanwhile, positive reviews cluster almost entirely into two camps: employees at companies profiting from the AI boom, and those whose employers actually invest in training and support. Roughly a quarter of positive comments are just generic praise with no substance behind them.
Where this gets interesting — and uncomfortable — is the demographic split. Gen Z women are the most skeptical group in the entire workforce, with only 21 percent of their AI-related comments landing positive, compared to 42 percent for Gen Z men. That gap can’t be explained away by industry or occupation the way it can for Gen X workers. Glassdoor’s analysts note that some negativity overlaps with burnout-heavy roles like insurance claims and customer service, where layoff fears were already simmering before AI arrived. But many reviews draw a direct line from AI implementation to actual job losses.
Company size adds another wrinkle. At small firms with fewer than 200 employees, 51 percent of AI comments are negative. At companies with more than 10,000 workers, that figure jumps to 67 percent — bigger organizations appear to be deploying AI in ways that frustrate more people, or at least giving more people reasons to complain. Glassdoor reviews skew negative by nature, so the absolute numbers deserve some skepticism. But the trend line matters more than the baseline, and it tracks with what Anthropic and Stanford’s AI Index have documented: executives see promise, the public sees pain, and the gap between those two realities keeps widening.
