After Roger Kirkness started his company Convictional in January to help other remote and hybrid companies track their goals, his team began accelerating its work by outsourcing more and more time-consuming tasks to artificial intelligence. As workers across the United States and Canada faced burnout from having to make more decisions faster, the company decided to give them a four-day workweek so they could benefit from the automation.
“I was surprised we could get the same amount done,” said Kirkness, who works from Waterloo, Canada. “People are way happier.”
While a growing number of U.S. employers are mandating workers to the office five days a week, some companies say AI is saving them enough time to launch or sustain a four-day workweek. More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for work-life balance.
AI “has such a potential to have so much labor savings, you’ll see firms shift to a four day week in an evolutionary way,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who has studied the issue. “There’s enough social consensus that people are exhausted and stressed.”
The adoption of AI in the workplace is still in the early stages, but new survey data shows that usage is ticking up. About 45 percent of U.S. employees in the third quarter said they use AI at work at least a few times a year, according to a recent poll from Gallup, representing an increase of five percentage points over the previous quarter. Still, those who use it daily only make up 10 percent, up two percentage points during the same period.
Several companies — especially those with a largely remote workforce — have adjusted their work rhythm after delegating many tasks to AI.
Convictional employees use AI to help with coding, generating marketing copy and breaking down projects, Kirkness said. As a result, employees are shifting to delegating tasks, he added. Prentice Bjerkeseth, a product engineer at Convictional, said he and his teammates mostly use Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding assistant, and AI features built into its own software for meetings, email and documents. The shift with AI forces them to do more creative work, he said.
“Everyone has those times when they hit their head against the wall and they’re exhausted,” he said, adding that having some rest often leads to breakthroughs. “A lot more of that happens 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 troves of data from clients to help create new digital products for brands, said founder and CEO Taylor Rosenbauer. It has had a four-day workweek for three years, and employees work in concentrated two-week sprints with tight deadlines.
“There’s just been a constant pressure to deliver as much value as possible,” Rosenbauer said, adding that AI helps the company accomplish its goals on a shortened timeline.
Small and medium businesses often adopt shortened workweeks to compete with big salaries for new hires and retention, Schor said.
That’s how Peak PEO, a London-based service that helps companies expand globally with teams in different locations, thought about its strategy.
The company’s industry exploded during the pandemic, so in February 2023, Peak PEO began “ultra flexible Fridays,” allowing the company’s team of 20 to choose how to spend the day. That later evolved into the four-day workweek. CEO Alex Voakes said that job openings that used to get two applications jumped to 350 after the change.
At the same time, the company was using AI to do repetitive tasks such as invoices and creating documents as well as helping the sales team crunch data to find new prospective clients. While the shortened week and AI initiatives were separate, Voakes said it became clear that they complemented each other.
“It’s like the perfect harmony of automation, engagement with employees and pride in people’s work,” Voakes said, adding that employees found purpose in their free time by getting more involved in their communities or starting artistic projects.
This approach could be tougher for law firms, as attorneys may worry about reduced 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 attorneys are women who were juggling caregiving, educational and home duties during the pandemic. In April 2020, Managing Partner Quinn Ross said, the firm adopted a rotation that provided employees the time they needed to manage family responsibilities without affecting pay. Productivity and happiness shot up, Ross said, so the firm shifted to an eight-hour, four-day workweek in June 2020.
The firm had already been using older AI tools for automated document and email management. But the firm says generative AI gave employees the ability to do research faster with ChatGPT Pro and automate processes such as tracking billable hours, summarizing calls and planning next steps for clients.
“We have to treat it like a new lawyer with a huge vocabulary and fast turnaround time,” Ross said. “This tool does not teach you. You must know the answers to use it.”
But the shift to a four-day workweek comes with challenges. Leaders say one of the big ones is educating their teams about the ways to use AI, given the need to keep some data confidential as well as bots’ potential to introduce errors. Employees sometimes struggle with the transition and frequent updates to the models can require companies to shift strategies.
Still, big companies are taking notice. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon expects AI to cut the workweek down 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, which has a five-day in-office policy, may have to provide retraining, redeploy employees and offer early retirement as a result.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, this year suggested a shortened workweek might come even sooner. “With AI over the next decade, [intelligence] will become free, commonplace,” he said on “The Tonight Show.” “What will jobs be like? Should we just work like two or three days a week?”
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan expects workers to have “digital twins,” or AI bots that can work alongside them to do things like manage their email, consolidate their messages and attend meetings they can’t. The goal is to have a three- or four-day workweek within five years, he said. Zoom’s current work policy is hybrid, where workers come into the office a few days a week.
Joe O’Connor, CEO and co-founder of Work Time Revolution, a Toronto-based research firm, said though the current economic climate might give some companies pause about adopting four-day workweeks, he expects that to change in the next several years. As companies save time with AI, they’ll have a choice to make, he said: “Deliver the same with lower costs or invest in the workforce and deliver more value.”
The companies that have adopted the four-day workweek say ironically AI is helping them work toward a more humane environment.
The Ross Firm says there is no way it could reverse its current plan.
These “are golden handcuffs we’re happy to wear,” Ross said.
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