Zoom CEO Eric Yuan believes that the use of AI in the workplace will ultimately lead to a shorter workweek, to the point where a five-day workweek would no longer be necessary, and every company could support three- or four-day weeks.
In an interaction with The New York Times, Yuan said, “In other words, I feel like if A.I. can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week? Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think this ultimately frees up everyone’s time.”
Speaking about the impact of AI on the workforce, he said, “Whenever there’s a technology paradigm shift, some job opportunities are gone, but it will create some new opportunities, right? For some jobs, like entry-level engineers, we can use A.I. to write code. However, you still need to manage that code. You also create a lot of digital agents, and you need someone to manage those agents.”
The impact of AI on the workforce has remained a hotly contested topic in recent years. While some business leaders, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, believe that AI would lead to widespread job loss, especially in white-collar positions, others, like Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, have previously said that the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the next 5-10 years could usher in an era of “radical abundance” and a kind of “golden era.”
Meanwhile, Yuan isn’t the first to make these remarks about the use of AI shortening the workweek. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have both previously said that AI could handle a bulk of work in the future and that it would give the general public a chance to dial back from their work.
”If you eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK,” Gates told Trevor Noah in a podcast in 2023.
Unlike Gates, Huang believes that there is a possibility of having four-day workweeks in the future, but people could actually become busier than they are now. Huang warns that a four-day week would mean cramming the same or more amount of work into a condensed schedule.
