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Zoom chief backs Bill Gates, says AI could usher in three-day workweek
Yuan said he believes AI adoption will allow companies to move towards three- or four-day weeks.
Eric Yuan said he believes AI adoption will allow companies to move towards three- or four-day weeks.
Zoom’s chief executive Eric Yuan has joined the chorus of prominent technology leaders predicting that artificial intelligence will dramatically reshape the workplace, potentially making the traditional five-day workweek redundant.
In an interview with The New York Times, Yuan said he believes AI adoption will allow companies to move towards three- or four-day weeks. Yuan said that if AI can make all of people's lives better, why do they need to work for five days a week? He backed the notion that every company will support three days, four days a week, and that it will ultimately frees up everyone’s time.
The Zoom boss acknowledged that technological disruption inevitably alters job markets. While some entry-level roles — such as junior engineers — may be replaced by AI systems capable of writing code, he stressed that oversight and management would still be essential. “Whenever there’s a technology paradigm shift, some job opportunities are gone, but it will create some new opportunities. You also create a lot of digital agents, and you need someone to manage those agents,” he explained.
The debate around AI’s impact on employment continues to divide opinion. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that widespread white-collar job losses could follow, while Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis has suggested that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) within the next decade could herald a “golden era” of “radical abundance.”
Yuan’s comments echo earlier predictions by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. In 2023, Gates told Trevor Noah on a podcast that “if you eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK.”
Huang, however, has cautioned that reduced workweeks may not automatically translate to more leisure. He argued that while a four-day week could become feasible, the intensity of work might increase as employees try to fit the same — or greater — volume of tasks into fewer days.
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