Sorry, A.I. Is Not Giving Us a Four-Day Workweek

“Some of the brightest minds in business believe that artificial intelligence will spell the end of the 40-hour workweek. The financier Steve Cohen has said we will work four days per week soon, while Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, predicts it will be three. Bill Gates foresees a two-day workweek within a decade, and Elon Musk says work will ultimately become optional altogether, akin to a hobby, like “playing sports or a video game.”

 

Don’t count on it.

 

The truth is, any one of these executives could have shortened the workweek years ago, long before A.I.

 

Studies have proved that a four-day workweek with the same pay is not only possible, but superior. A 2015 trial in Iceland was so successful — productivity remained the same or better, while employee satisfaction soared — that it has since expanded throughout the country. A 2022 study in Britain involving 61 companies and almost 3,000 employees found that revenue increased, while employee stress and burnout plunged. Experiments in New Zealand, Japan, Australia and Brazil have also been home runs.

 

Americans overwhelmingly favor a four-day workweek, too. Yet it has largely been a non-starter here. In my four-plus decades as a journalist and editor, I’ve written and assigned multiple articles about workplace trends. Almost every expert prediction on the demise of the five-day workweek has been wrong.

 

Why? Because we consistently underestimate executives’ ferocious attachment to face time. The very leaders rhapsodizing about a shorter workweek in the future are demanding more time, not less, from their employees in the here and now. Mr. Musk requires a “minimum” of 40 hours in the office, and has said it takes 80 hours or more a week to have real impact. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who also foresees a four-day workweek, has said he personally works seven days. The JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon, who predicts a workweek of 3.5 days, insists on five full days in the office, and is a vociferous critic of remote work.

 

The forecasters predicting the four-day workweek also overestimate how much time technology will actually save. When I was a college intern at The Wall Street Journal in the early 1980s, we typed on manual typewriters using triplicate carbon paper, and fixed mistakes by cutting and pasting with scissors and glue. Theoretically, our work hours should have plunged with the advent of digital tools — but instead they exploded, as technology created the ability to publish around the clock.

 

Full-time employees last year worked an average of 41.9 hours per week, a figure that hasn’t changed much since the pre-internet 1990s. And at home, the advent of the internet didn’t decrease the amount of time Americans spent on housework. It’s an old pattern: As dishwashers and microwaves supercharged productivity in the 20th century, expectations about cleanliness, nutrition and child-rearing ballooned accordingly, and chores like laundry that once might have been outsourced migrated right back to homeowners.

 

A.I. appears to be following the same trajectory, increasing our output rather than decreasing our workload. A recent study of a 200-employee tech firm concluded that “A.I. tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it,” leading to “workload creep” as employees began taking on additional responsibilities. Similarly, a 2025 paper found that A.I. use “is associated with longer work hours and less leisure.”

 

Perhaps this time really will be different, and A.I. will significantly reduce the workweek. There may be no choice, if those who believe we are on the verge of an A.I. jobs apocalypse are correct. Already, Cisco, Block, Coinbase, HP, IBM and Salesforce are among the companies that have cited A.I. as a reason for layoffs. Some economists believe we will need to reduce work hours to allow more people to share in the labor and the paychecks.

 

Notably, while the chorus of leaders predicting a shorter workweek continues to grow, most are vague about when that change might happen. None of them appear to be setting things in motion now. Admittedly, a wholesale shift to a shorter workweek would be highly complex for large companies — and far more so for a society that’s built around the five-day cadence, encompassing everything from school hours to infrastructure projects.

 

A shorter workweek would also require a significant shift in America’s workaholic culture, which views busyness as a status symbol. While Americans say they want a shorter workweek, most employees in a recent survey said they would use the majority of time savings from A.I. to do more work. As it is, more than 40 percent of Americans don’t take all of their vacation days, and 88 percent of parents in a recent survey said it was important for their children to have careers they enjoyed, more than quadruple the percentage who said it was important to get married and have kids. There’s a reason that one of the most quoted lines from “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is the workaholic editor Miranda Priestly cooing, “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?”

 

Despite the obstacles, there are a few causes for optimism. A few small U.S. companies have adopted a four-day workweek in recent years, including Kickstarter and ThredUp. ThredUp’s chief executive said he’s seen “tremendous improvements” in employee happiness and creativity, and that “retention metrics are through the roof.”

 

Business leaders began forecasting the demise of the five-day workweek even before Henry Ford standardized it in 1926. The engineer Charles Steinmetz in 1923 asserted that electric power would lead to a four-hour workday within a century. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek by 2030. Now, the shorter workweek can finally become a reality. There’s no need to depend on some magical moment when A.I. suddenly changes the way we work. Companies should stop making vague predictions about a shorter workweek, and start making it happen.

 

Joanne Lipman is a lecturer at Yale University and was previously an editor at The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.” [1]

 

1. Sorry, A.I. Is Not Giving Us a Four-Day Workweek: Guest Essay. Lipman, Joanne.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 6, 2026.