Will AI Mean Fewer Jobs—or Fewer Hours? It’s Up To Us.

“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
— Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, internal memo to employees, June 17, 2025

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently announced (in a quite clinical and nonplussed fashion) that AI will shrink Amazon’s workforce. Two weeks after this announcement, on July 2, Microsoft announced it would lay off 9,100 employees — about 4% of its global workforce. Google, Meta, and others have also laid off thousands of employees recently. If you’re wondering if the age of the AI-driven layoff is here, you can ask the employees of these companies who were laid off…It may not be in full bloom yet, but it’s here.

AI causing worktime reduction feels inevitable, especially as more and more companies begin integrating AI into their workplace. The big question isn’t will AI result in less work. It will. The big question is will “worktime reduction” happen in the form of massive job loss and layoffs, or will it happen in the form of shorter workweeks with full pay and benefits? Fewer jobs or fewer hours/days?

What’s happening in tech isn’t routine downsizing. It’s a structural shift. AI is completing tasks that once required entire teams of coders, analysts, writers, and lawyers. Companies are seizing the opportunity to cut headcount. Many argue, including titans of industry, this “AI disruption” will automatically usher in a golden age of less work and more freedom. Bill Gates recently predicted AI could lead to 3-day workweeks. Jamie Dimon claimed today’s children will live to 100 and work just three and a half days a week. Billionaire investor Steve Cohen predicted a shift to 4-day schedules thanks to AI-powered productivity.

These predictions are optimistic at best, duplicitous at worst — and most likely, just plain naive. History shows that productivity and financial gains don’t automatically translate into fewer hours for workers. Productivity has soared over 400% since 1950, and CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978. Yet the workweek has remained the same. 

Nothing about how companies are deploying AI today — as a tool to replace workers, not ease workloads — suggests this technology will be any different in terms of the type of impact on the workforce (leading to fewer jobs rather than fewer hours/days), even it’s different in degree. If anything, AI threatens to accelerate the very economic disparities that past innovations reified. Computers didn’t shorten the workweek. The internet didn’t. Automation didn’t. AI won’t either, unless we force it to. 

This is especially true at publicly traded companies, like those mentioned above. Publicly traded companies are extremely unlikely to reduce hours out of generosity or logic unless they’re required to. While nearly 300 U.S. companies have already adopted 4-day, 32-hour workweeks, almost all are privately held. Meanwhile, publicly traded corporations, which employ nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce, face relentless pressure to deliver short-term profits. 

Even though 4-day, 32-hour workweek pilots overwhelmingly demonstrate it’s a win-win for both employees and employers, Wall Street is structured to reward a simpler and regressive strategy for leveraging efficiency gains: cut jobs, boost margins, and watch the stock price climb. Investors equate job cuts (when the stated motivation for the layoffs is efficiency, not business struggles) with immediate cost savings, even when job cuts threaten a business’s long-term sustainability and growth. Bloomberg data shows that large U.S. tech firms saw their stocks rise an average of 5.6% in the month following a layoff announcement. When Google/Alphabet laid off 12,000 people, its stock jumped 15%. Microsoft’s stock rose 6% after laying off 10,000. Meta’s shares surged nearly 50% after its cuts.

Politics and cultural change may be the only real counterweight to the profit-based incentives driving today’s AI layoffs. These cuts aren’t happening at distressed companies. They’re happening at some of the most profitable, well-resourced companies in the world with market caps in the trillions of dollars. That’s what makes this trend so alarming. You’d expect companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc. to be the ones best positioned to resist short-term pressures and implement forward-looking workplace policies that benefit both their business and their workers. You’d expect them to recognize the opportunity to become generational, visionary leaders — to break the Wall Street mindset on job cuts, much like Henry Ford did a century ago when he introduced the 5-day, 40-hour workweek for his workers despite widespread skepticism from the investor class.

But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, the tech sector could be offering a harrowing preview of what’s coming for everyone else. These companies are deploying AI faster than the rest of the economy, and they’re doing it in ways that replace people rather than reduce hours.

That’s why we need a structural correction: shorter workweeks. A 4-day, 32-hour workweek with full pay is the clearest way to ensure AI’s benefits are distributed rather than hoarded because it directly confronts the core economic risk AI creates: doing the same work with fewer people. Retraining programs, universal basic income, and ethical AI pledges may help soften the blow, but they don’t change the underlying dynamic. Reducing work hours without reducing pay absorbs those efficiency gains by design. It keeps people employed, spreads work across more hands, and builds a new baseline of dignity.

The collective choice we face isn’t whether we let AI reshape work. It will. The choice is whether we sit back and let that reshaping hollow out jobs — or if we instead fight for a future where everyone works less and lives better.