Workplace Sadness in the United Kingdom Is Among the Highest in Europe: Can AI Improve Contentment?

According to research published in Gallup’s State of the Workplace 2025 report, 26% of employees in the United Kingdom claimed they felt sadness a lot of the day.

The findings are a significant increase from the 19% of staff who felt sadness in 2021, placing the UK second among Europe’s most discontented.

The report also found that 41% of employees from the United Kingdom felt stressed at work, suggesting that many workers experience negative feelings regularly in their employment. But can technology provide a helping hand in overcoming sadness at work?

The artificial intelligence market is forecasted to reach a value of £3.6 trillion) by 2033, and its rapid growth has the power to transform countless industries in the process. The vast potential of AI is likely to influence workplace lifestyles up and down the country.

Although many workers fear the implications of adopting automation technology, AI is already generating use cases that can help to improve workplace contentment. With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at artificial intelligence and its ability to prevent sadness at work:

Taking the Repetition Out of Work

The mundanity of repetitive tasks can be a major pain point for employees, and artificial intelligence has the potential to create a more engaging work environment by automating repetitive tasks at scale.

According to an ABBYY survey carried out by Sapio Research, 92% of employees claim they waste up to eight hours a week searching documents for information to serve customers. This can not only be a leading source of wasted productivity but can also lead to widespread discontentment among workers.

Using AI to automate repetitive tasks in the workplace can empower more employees to allocate their energy to more meaningful work. For instance, UK firm Costain successfully automated its manual invoice process, consisting of 400,000 invoices, saving nine minutes per invoice and allowing employees to adopt more fulfilling workloads.

Predictive Analytics for Preemptive Support

Another advantage of AI is that employers can prevent instances of burnout among workers and lower turnover with the help of predictive analytics.

Using predictive models, it’s possible to identify the early signs of employee burnout and offer a bespoke program designed to provide proactive support and boost worker retention.

In a similar way that AI models are being utilised to take preemptive action when a customer is stuck browsing a website and may need assistance, artificial intelligence can determine when an employee needs support from an internal help desk, which can reach out with bespoke problem-solving resources to quickly address issues.

Nurturing Performance

The ability to passively collect, measure, and analyse data with the help of AI tools like machine learning means that businesses can track the performance of employees and identify areas of improvement to nurture stronger engagement.

This means that managers have the ability to work with more insight-driven targets for workers that can prevent feelings of stress and sadness caused by one-size-fits-all approaches to career progression.

According to Deloitte data, 53% of global organisation leaders believe that their business is in the early stages of identifying more adaptive ways to measure worker performance. Artificial intelligence will be a leading technology in this endeavour, helping to build stronger engagement and satisfaction by adding that all-important personal touch to employee training.

Effective Talent Acquisition

Job role and talent mismatches can be another source of sadness for both employees and recruiters. In highly skilled roles, it can be extremely stressful to shoehorn hires into tasks that require significant upskilling that may take months or even years to achieve.

Artificial intelligence can improve talent acquisition for more employee contentment by crafting accurate, generative job descriptions that are adaptive enough to attract the best candidates based on real-time market data.

AI platforms can analyse global talent pools, identifying and engaging the best prospects before job hunting has even begun.

Given that advances in AI and automation technology have built a more conducive remote environment for employees, EOR can also bridge talent gaps at scale and help protect more employees against feelings of sadness from ill-fitting job roles.

AI as a Happiness Tool

The artificial intelligence boom is a source of optimism and concern for employees in the United Kingdom.

For a nation that’s among the least content at work, AI is capable of helping to automate monotonous tasks, providing bespoke training, preempting troubleshooting tools, and improving the accuracy of skilled hires.

Using these tools effectively can significantly improve workplace engagement and productivity across a vast range of industries. Although the full impact of workplace AI is yet to be felt, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future of automation technology.