AI helps businesses adopt the four-day work week

After Roger Kirkness launched his company Convictional in January to help other remote and hybrid businesses track their goals, his team began ramping up its work by outsourcing more and more time-consuming tasks to artificial intelligence. As workers in the United States and Canada faced burnout due to the need to make more decisions faster, the company decided to offer them a four-day work week so they can benefit from automation.

“I was surprised that we could achieve the same amount,” said Kirkness, who works in Waterloo, Canada. “People are much happier.”

As a growing number of U.S. employers force employees back into the office five days a week, some companies say AI buys them enough time to start or maintain a four-day work week. More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, particularly those in younger generations, continue to push for a shorter workweek. work-life balance.

AI “has such potential to save so much labor that you will see companies move to the four-day week in a scalable way,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who has studied the issue. “There is enough social consensus that people are exhausted and stressed.”

AI adoption in the workplace is still in its early stages, but new survey data shows its use is accelerating. In the third quarter, about 45% of U.S. employees reported using AI at work at least a few times a year, according to a recent Gallup poll, representing an increase of five percentage points from the previous quarter. Yet those who use it daily account for just 10 percent, an increase of two percentage points over the same period.

Many companies – particularly those with largely remote workforces – have adjusted their work pace after delegating many tasks to AI.

Confident employees use AI to help with coding, generate marketing copy and break down projects, Kirkness said. As a result, employees are turning to task delegation, he added. Prentice Bjerkeseth, a product engineer at Convictional, said he and his teammates primarily use Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding assistant, and AI features built into its own software for meetings, emails and documents. The move to AI forces them to do more creative work, he said.

“Everyone has times where they’re banging their head against the wall and they’re exhausted,” he said, adding that rest often leads to breakthroughs. “This is happening a lot more with the extra time off.”

For New York-based design and strategy firm RocketAir, an internally developed AI tool helps its strategists and designers contextualize reams of data from customers to help create new digital products for brands, said founder and CEO Taylor Rosenbauer. The workweek has been four days for the past three years, and employees work in concentrated two-week sprints with tight deadlines.

“There’s just constant pressure to deliver as much value as possible,” Rosenbauer said, adding that AI helps the company achieve its goals in a shorter time frame.

Small and medium-sized businesses often adopt shortened work weeks to compete with high wages for new hires and retention, Schor said.

That’s how Peak PEO, a London-based service that helps businesses scale globally with teams across locations, thought about its strategy.

The corporate sector has boomed during the pandemic, so in February 2023, Peak PEO launched “Ultra Flexible Fridays,” allowing the company’s 20-person team to choose how to spend the day. This later evolved into the four-day work week. CEO Alex Voakes said job postings that previously received two applications increased to 350 after the change.

At the same time, the company used AI to perform repetitive tasks such as invoicing and document creation, as well as to help the sales team process data to find new potential customers. Although the shortened week and the AI ​​initiatives were separate, Voakes said it became clear that they complemented each other.

“It’s like the perfect harmony between automation, engagement with employees and pride in people’s work,” Voakes said, adding that employees are finding meaning in their free time by becoming more involved in their community or starting art projects.

This approach might be more difficult for law firms because attorneys might be concerned about reducing billable hours. But leaders at the Ross firm based in Ontario, Canada, felt they had no choice but to change, because 48 of the firm’s 50 staff members and lawyers are women who were juggling caregiving, education and household chores during the pandemic. In April 2020, managing partner Quinn Ross said, the firm adopted a rotation that gave employees the time they needed to manage family responsibilities without affecting their pay. Productivity and happiness increased, Ross said, so the company moved to an eight-hour, four-day work week in June 2020.

The company was already using legacy AI tools for automated document and email management. But the company says Generative AI gave employees the ability to research faster with ChatGPT Pro and automate processes like tracking billable hours, summarizing calls, and planning next steps for clients.

“We have to treat him like a new lawyer with a huge vocabulary and a quick turnaround,” Ross said. “This tool doesn’t teach you. You have to know the answers to use it.”

But moving to a four-day work week comes with its share of challenges. Executives say one of the most important tasks is educating their teams on ways to use AI, given the need to keep some data private as well as the potential for bots to introduce errors. Employees sometimes struggle to manage the transition, and frequent model updates can force companies to change their strategies.

Yet big companies are taking notice. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, expects AI to reduce the work week to three and a half days over the next 20, 30 or even 40 years, he said at a business forum last month. He also suggested that employers like his, who have a five-day on-office policy, may need to offer retraining, redeploy their employees and offer early retirement accordingly.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, suggested this year that a shortened work week could come even sooner. “With AI over the next decade, (intelligence) will become free and mainstream,” he said on “The Tonight Show.” “What will the jobs look like? Should we just work two or three days a week?”

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan expects employees to have “digital twins,” or AI robots that can work alongside them to do tasks like manage their email, consolidate their messages and attend meetings they can’t attend. The goal is to have a three- or four-day work week within five years, he said. Zoom’s current work policy is hybrid, in which workers come to the office a few days a week.

Joe O’Connor, CEO and co-founder of Work Time Revolution, a Toronto-based research firm, said that while the current economic climate might cause some companies to think twice before adopting the four-day workweek, he expects that to change over the next few years. As companies gain more time with AI, they will have a choice to make, he said: “Offer the same thing at a lower cost or invest in labor and deliver more value.” »

Companies that have adopted the four-day work week ironically claim that AI helps them work towards a more humane environment.

The Ross company says it cannot reverse its current plan under any circumstances.

They are “golden handcuffs that we are happy to wear,” Ross said.