Why 3 days at work is the big AI promise that Bezos, Dimon, and Gates can't stop talking about

• Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and Bill Gates have all said that AI could shorten the workweek.
• Elon Musk has said work will become "optional," while Sam Altman has said people will keep hustling.
• A top economist told Business Insider that past innovations have led to people working much less.

Thursdays and Fridays off — forever?

Business leaders can't stop talking about AI shortening the workweek, and there are good reasons why.

Jeff Bezos joined the chorus last week when he told Fox News that AI will boost workers' productivity, enabling them to do in three days what previously took them five.

"Some people will decide: 'I can support my family working three days a week,'" Amazon's founder and chairman said, adding that two-earner households might also become a choice instead of a necessity.

Similarly, Jamie Dimon has repeatedly predicted in recent years that the next generation will work only three and a half days a week.

The JPMorgan CEO said this spring that those future workers will be able to "hike more" and "do all the things" that their predecessors didn't have the time to do.

Eric Yuan made the same case to The New York Times last fall, when he said AI will shoulder more of the workload in the future.

"Every company will support three days, four days a week," the Zoom CEO said. "I think this ultimately frees up everyone's time."

Moreover, Bill Gates has said a few times in recent years that broad, free access to intelligence will change the nature of work, and some people might opt to "just work two or three days a week."

Tech billionaire Mark Cuban of "Shark Tank" fame took a similar tack earlier this year, when he said that AI agents will cut people's workdays by "an hour to start."

Elon Musk went much further last year, saying that advances in AI, robotics, and other technologies will make work "optional" and something people do for fun, like "playing sports or a video game."

But he's warned this year of a "bumpy" transition to that leisurely future, and trumpeted government checks as the "best way" to replace incomes lost due to AI-driven unemployment.

Sam Altman has argued the opposite, saying this summer that people are too competitive, and enjoy striving too much, to work dramatically less.

The OpenAI CEO said that technological innovations throughout history have promised to let people enjoy more leisure.

"But we never get the promise of the four-hour workweek at mass scale in society," Altman said. "And I don't expect AI to change that."

A shorter workweek trumps job losses

Bezos, Dimon, Yuan, and Gates may be heralding a shorter working week because "that is what has happened in the past," Alex Tabarrok told Business Insider by email this week.

The economics professor at George Mason University, who co-writes the popular Marginal Revolution blog, said he sees a shorter workweek as "more likely" than mass unemployment, in part because he's skeptical there'll be nothing for humans to do.

"Surely, the smart AIs can think of something!" Tabarrok said. "People are quite flexible, and they invent new jobs all the time. Remember, under all the scenarios in which AIs do a lot of jobs, we are very, very rich."

In an April blog post, Tabarrok touched on another reason why business leaders might be rallying around a shared vision of less work and more leisure.

The prospect of AI causing the unemployment rate to spike to 40% sounds "catastrophic," he wrote, whereas the idea it will usher in a 3-day workweek sounds "wonderful" by comparison.

Yet he noted that the number of working hours stays the same whether you have 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed, or 100% of people employed but working 60% of their usual hours.

The "difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution," Tabarrok wrote, adding that it's "harder to defend" AI destroying livelihoods instead of raising productivity.

He emphasized that a downshift in work wouldn't be unprecedented. Typical hours of work per year in the US dropped by around 40% between 1870 and today, he said, but unemployment didn't increase, and people's childhoods, retirements, and life expectancy all lengthened. The percentage of a person's life spent working shrank from around 30% to roughly 10% over the same period, he noted.

"We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure," Tabarrok wrote. "There's no reason we cannot do it again."

Whether they're being earnest, optimistic, or calculating, it's evident why top executives are lining up to promote an enticing vision for the future of work, instead of a painful one.