It’s so beautiful it’s unbelievable. The emergence of the new models of artificial intelligence (AI) that we are witnessing these days could force the adoption of the four-day work week. Science says so!
There are AI specialists who fear the worst-case scenario. In the wrong hands, AI is a threat just like the nuclear bomb, these techno-pessimists have warned more than once.
Not necessarily, reply far more optimistic experts. In the hands of big business, they say, it will smash the conventional work schedule, and it will benefit workers. This is what advanced in a note shared in early June to its analysts and clients the American investment firm Jefferies.
More specifically, it is its division that deals with ESG (environment, society and governance) factors that has looked at the effect that these new technologies will have on office work very quickly. Jefferies cites in particular a study conducted jointly by MIT and Stanford, two of the most recognized universities in the North American technology sector. This study calculates that the productivity gains promised by simply adopting a digital assistant like OpenAI’s ChatGPT will average 14% per employee.
What Jefferies says is that the best way to use this productivity gain is to shorten the working week by one day for the employees who will be most affected by this little revolution in the making.
An AI for all?
In other good news, it is not executives or senior leaders who could benefit the most from the appearance in the office of a digital virtual assistant like ChatGPT. In other words, for once, it’s not just the already wealthier people who could put more in their pockets.
Cohere, half of whose roughly 200 employees are in Toronto, has developed an AI comparable to ChatGPT that targets the enterprise market. Cohere is recognized for having in its hands one of the best generative AI currently in activity.
Installed in a company, it can automate a host of small tasks. It can automatically generate expense reports and ensure proper follow-up so that they are approved and then processed by accounting. She can analyze the financial results and produce detailed analyses, identify strengths and weaknesses, suggest vectors of growth or unnecessary expenses that fall into the blind spot of managers.
She can find information on products, services, assets, internal references, past or present customers in seconds. Everything you need to turn even the newest employee into an expert just by asking a few natural language questions to this next-gen digital assistant.
All of this, of course, in a second, without human intervention.
Martin Kon, President and COO of Cohere, said he was surprised when I spoke to him last week to discover that generative AI was having an unexpected effect in business: it was helping to fill the gap of expertise between employees at the bottom of the ladder and those higher up the organization chart.
“In business sectors related to the knowledge economy, AI increases the level of productivity of employees who are the least knowledgeable more quickly,” he says. The lack of expertise will be reduced much more effectively in the future. »
Work four days… or seven?
Unsurprisingly, there are bosses who won’t want to reduce their subordinates’ work week. Recently, the CEO of a US marketing agency caused a stir when he instead suggested that AI will instead lead to the work week… of seven days. If a worker can automate his tasks and accomplish in 30 minutes the job of an entire working day, what would prevent him from having three or even four jobs at the same time and from working the equivalent of seven days a week?
Excellent question. Of course, the answer should be at the discretion of the worker. But the chances are slim that such an approach will become the norm in the world of work, experts say. Humans, it seems, still and always dream of the leisure society.
University of British Columbia computer and business researchers Vered Shwartz and Sima Sajjadiani draw parallels with 19th century industrializatione century. Revolutions that have taken place over the past 200 years have considerably reduced the working time needed to earn a living.
According to them, generative AI is the most recent of these revolutions. As it takes place in the midst of a worker shortage, it will lead to better employment conditions rather than their replacement, they say. “It’s time to move on to the four-day week, summarizes Sima Sajjadiani. I think in Canada it’s very doable,” she adds. More than in the United States.
If that happens, we can thank technology for having materialized the famous “Thursday”, the nickname we sometimes give to the Thursdays preceding a Friday off and which end the work week so well, before a weekend of three days.