AI and 4-day workweek: a duo to be reckoned with?
Many of the challenges people mention with the 4-day workweek are based on the need to be more focused and efficient. And a lot of what we hear about AI is it may be so efficient it puts us out of a job. This week we look at the collision of these two trends, and why we might be headed in a good direction after all. Read on!
AI meets the 4-Day Workweek
The robots are taking our jobs! It’s been a concern among workers for decades, and now it looks like it’s coming for the white-collar employees, right? Well, I can’t predict the future, but there are some people out there who don’t think it’s all doom and gloom. In fact, there are indications that it could be the key to another idea we’ve been exploring: the four-day workweek.
A few weeks ago we tackled the idea of the four-day workweek and how it has a lot of promise. One silver lining of the pandemic is a little more flexibility in managers’ mindsets about trying different work arrangements for staff. But people and businesses are still reluctant to try cramming every little task into 32 hours, and it doesn’t help anyone to score reduced hours if they just work themselves to exhaustion in four days instead of five.
*Cue infomercial voice* Isn’t there a better way? Well, we know generative AI is great at performing specific requests. Could it help pave the way for a shorter workweek by taking care of the little things for us? We can already use tools like ChatGPT for a variety of tasks, and it’s reasonable that it might help us cut hours while keeping up with our to-do lists. For example:
Improving communication: One of the biggest time sucks we have in creative businesses is miscommunication. Especially when it comes to sharing ideas. But with generative AI, we can have more robust storyboards or visual comps or even coded prototypes to share quickly and help clarify our concepts.
Reviewing input and ideas: Its ability to combine lots of information from different sources into one narrative or list can make it easier to understand feedback than having multiple disjointed messages.
Creating ideas: We'll still need to flesh them out, but AI can quickly offer suggestions about pretty much any topic we can imagine in multiple formats.
Writing first drafts: We know AI can come up with wrong information that sounds right, but when we give it the source material, it can give us something to react to in minutes. It can literally save hours because, unlike us, it never has writer's block or a bad day.
And these are just a few time-saving ideas around what we create. AI will also be able to help with how we run our shops. It can monitor our effectiveness as teams and find common challenges we face. If it's around forecasting, staffing, culture, client satisfaction, or employee well-being, we'll have a better big picture of our companies than ever before.
Will there be issues and false promises and charlatans galore? Of course! Will some people use it for not nice things, yep. But I'm confident we can use it to save time while improving our lives and the lives of those who work with us. And if anything can shave eight hours off a week without an impact on the bottom line, this sure feels like the way to make a 4-day workweek a reality.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but am I the only one? What do you think about AI and the 4-day workweek?