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"When people know they are being watched, they tend to perform. It is an automatic response and often, people don't even realize they are doing it,” explains therapist Amy Sutton from Freedom Counselling. This is known as the Hawthorne Effect. The tendency to change behavior when you know you’re being observed. In the context of AI monitoring your mental health that could mean people masking signs of distress, consciously or not. On the flip side, if these tools are rolled out as part of workplace wellbeing programmes and people don’t know they’re being monitored, that raises serious questions

The businesses that win with AI in 2026 won't be the ones with the most sophisticated ROI dashboards. They'll be the ones that started with a sharply defined problem and worked forward to a solution, rather than starting with a tool and working backwards to a justification. The ones that ask the right questions. The difference shows up in how the conversation begins. "We need to deploy generative AI across customer service" is a tool-first frame; the ROI question becomes unanswerable because the goal is the deployment itself. "Our agents spend 40% of every call searching three systems for poli