A three-day workweek may sound far-fetched, but some of the world's most prominent executives believe artificial intelligence will make shorter hours a reality. Business leaders remain sharply divided on how the technology will transform work: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted a white-collar jobs armageddon, while Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis believes AI will usher in a “golden era” of abundance.

Yet as chatbots and automated assistants take over duties once performed by humans, a growing cohort of executives sees shorter workweeks on the horizon. Among them is Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, who has envisioned staffers clocking in only a few days a week.

“I feel like if AI can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week?” Yuan told The New York Times in a 2025 interview. “Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think this ultimately frees up everyone’s time.”

That vision is music to the ears of Americans stuck in corporate hustle culture, who have enviously watched their European peers trial four-day workweeks with major success. The idea has already been stress-tested beyond the continent: in a widely watched 2022 pilot, 61 U.K. companies trialed a four-day week over six months, and the vast majority kept the arrangement afterward. And when U.S. performance coaching company Exos experimented with schedules one workday shorter, the change proved good for business: employee burnout was cut in half, and productivity soared by 24%.

Executives agree that shorter workweeks born from these automation gains will be terrific for human workers—even if it means fewer of them have jobs in general.

Gates, Huang, and Dimon see a shorter workweek ahead

AI tools can already be immensely useful for staffers, cutting out everything from menial tasks like emailing to more tedious jobs like coding. Tech leaders are seeing those gains firsthand, and many are promoting the possibility that employees will no longer have to clock in five days a week. A shift of that size would force employers to rethink fundamentals like how output is measured, how pay is structured, and how teams stay in sync—which helps explain why these C-suite forecasts are being scrutinized well beyond Silicon Valley.

Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has predicted that AI's current pace of innovation will remove the need for humans to do “most things” within the next 10 years. Once people are no longer needed, those who remain on staff will not have to swipe in daily.

“What will jobs be like? Should we just work like 2 or 3 days a week?” Gates told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show last year. “If you zoom out, the purpose of life is not just to do jobs.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is also on board with the idea of fewer workdays—though with a catch. The leader of the $5.3 trillion GPU company said the world is just “at the beginning of the AI revolution,” and if industries continue adopting artificial intelligence at the current rapid rate, it could “probably” bring about a four-day workweek. Even then, the work may be crammed into a condensed schedule, as Huang predicts people will be “busier in the future than now.”

Even the financial industry—long known for putting its workers through 80-hour workweeks—may finally get some relief from AI automation. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon predicted years ago that the technology could bring about better work-life balance, although it would “of course” replace some jobs.

“Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology,” Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in 2023. “And literally they’ll probably be working 3 and a half days a week.”

Zoom CEO admits some jobs will be erased

While workers around the world may eventually get the chance to clock in fewer days per week, not everyone will enjoy the shortened schedules. Leaders broadly accept that the jobs market faces massive upheaval, with some roles inevitably automated in the shift. Yuan does not shy away from the reality that some people will be fired—but he frames it as just another adjustment, comparable to the industrial revolution and the birth of the internet. How quickly any new opportunities materialize—and whether they reach the workers displaced first—remains one of the central open questions as companies scale up their AI deployments.

“Whenever there's a technology paradigm shift, some job opportunities are gone, but it will create some new opportunities,” Yuan said in the interview. “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.”

Other chief executives, including Ford CEO Jim Farley and Klarna leader Sebastian Siemiatkowski, agree that some roles will be erased in the transition. Huang, however, believes the shift could actually bolster employment. Rather than humans being replaced outright by AI, he has argued that people's roles will instead be taken over by others who know how to use the advanced technology.

“Over the course of the last 300 years, 100 years, 60 years, even, in the era of computers, not only did productivity go up, employment also went up,” Huang told CNN last year. “Now the reason for that is if we have an abundance of ideas, ways that we could build a better future, if we were more productive, we could realize that better.”

For now, a three-day week remains an executive forecast rather than workplace policy. The clearest signals to watch will be corporate AI adoption data and whether shorter-week pilots expand beyond the early trials.

A version of this story was published on Fortune on September 15, 2025. This story was originally featured on Fortune.