Jamie Dimon, Anthony Scaramucci, and Bill Gates have all predicted AI will eventually shrink the workweek to three or four days, echoing a forecast economist John Maynard Keynes made back in 1930, when he argued technology would eventually cut work down to just 15 hours a week, according to Fortune.
Keynes has not been proven right yet. Despite roughly a century of technological leaps, from electrification through the rise of the internet, the average American workweek has only drifted from about 38 hours down to 34. Fortune's reporting frames that gap as evidence that new technology does not automatically hand workers their time back. Instead, the efficiency gains from each wave of innovation have largely been captured by employers rather than passed on as shorter hours.
The case for AI doing things differently rests on real evidence of a shorter week working well in practice. Microsoft Japan reported a 40 percent productivity boost after moving to a four day schedule, and a landmark trial spanning more than 900 workers across 33 companies found 97 percent of participants wanted to keep the arrangement, with businesses reporting an 8 percent bump in revenue. Separate research from author Dan Schawbel in 2018 found 34 percent of workers already preferred a four day setup. Workers using AI tools today are already recovering more than two hours a day, roughly 10 hours a week, in time savings.
Schawbel argues the obstacle is not really technological at all, it is structural. Under the way American businesses currently operate, efficiency gains tend to flow into more output rather than fewer hours. When AI lets an employee finish a task faster, the typical response is to hand that employee more work rather than send them home early. The federal standard defining a normal workweek has not changed since 1940, and no major legislation currently on the table would shorten it.
Absent a shift in policy or workplace culture that values recovery over simple presence, Fortune's reporting suggests AI is likely to follow the same pattern as the technologies that came before it, boosting productivity while leaving the standard workweek largely untouched.