Zoom CEO Eric Yuan predicts 3-day working week as AI reshapes traditional job roles

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

However, Yuan also acknowledged the reality of AI taking away certain job roles. “Whenever there’s a technology paradigm shift, some job opportunities are gone, but it will create some new opportunities. 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,” he said.

The Zoom founder’s remarks come amid an evolving discussion about AI and the future of work among tech industry leaders, who are split into various groups based on their opinions. While those like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned that AI may eliminate 50 per cent of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, others like Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis believe that AI will bring dramatic advances and a possible future of “radical abundance” despite acknowledged risks.

Yuan’s view aligns with those expressed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang.

“We weren’t born to do jobs. I mean, jobs are an artefact of the shortage that, oh, gosh, somebody better be a farmer or somebody better drive those trucks around. And so it’s very hard to imagine this future because the whole system of markets and pricing and how you go about education, all of that is based on creating the human intelligence to provide a broad range of services. And so as you get away from that being a necessary thing, you get a lot more leisure time, and you get almost a philosophical question of, therefore…,” Gates said in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group, at an Express Adda held in Mumbai a few months ago.

Huang has said that we’re just “at the beginning of the AI revolution,” and if industries continue to adopt AI at the current rapid rate, it could “probably” bring about a four-day work-week.

“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. 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,” Huang was quoted as saying by CNN earlier this year.

Zoom, meanwhile, has also been looking to capitalise on the generative AI boom by integrating the technology across its product suite and launching new AI-powered productivity tools such as Zoom Docs, Zoom Whiteboard, and Zoom AI Companion to take on tech giants like Google and Microsoft.