Is AI the secret sauce for the four-day workweek?

Despite the well-publicized success of four-day workweek pilots around the globe, it’s still a relatively uncommon way of working.

“There is a lot of traditional thinking and managerial resistance in most organizations against four-day workweeks,” says Leslie Joseph, principal analyst at Forrester.

Companies that have experimented with four-day workweeks have generally gotten positive results, so long as there is systemic support in the organization, Joseph says. “They found that their employees actually appreciated it and found themselves to be more productive. Individual mental health and individual work-life balance [also] improved.” 

But the perception remains that employees can’t possibly get as much done in a 32-hour workweek as in a 40-hour one. Whether or not that’s true with traditional ways of working, some organizations are finding that automation and new AI tools — particularly generative AI — have proven to be a key factor in making their four-day workweeks a success.

Working asynchronously with the help of AI

Colin Bryce, managing director of Cobry, a Google Cloud partner in the United Kingdom, introduced a four-day workweek to the organization two and a half years ago. The timing was notable because it preceded the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools by a few months, giving the organization a snapshot of four-day workweeks before and after genAI.

Before the move, Bryce’s research into the four-day workweek showed that phased transitions, where different parts of the organization are brought onto the new schedule in batches, often did not work well because companies fell into a kind of “analysis paralysis.”

“It usually ends up with people just getting spooked and reversing course. So if you’re going to do it, just go for it,” Bryce advises.

When the four-day workweek was rolled out company-wide at Cobry, Bryce asked all employees to remember several principles to increase efficiency even as they reduced working hours. “Automate where you can, eliminate where you can, outsource or delegate where you can, and educate if there’s a need for some learning to improve efficiency,” he says.

According to Bryce, the arrival of ChatGPT and other tools introduced another principle: “How can we use AI to make the four-day week work better?”

This principle was crucial because Cobry’s approach to four-day workweeks led to some operational challenges. Internally referred to as “20% time,” the policy allows employees to take off 20% of every day, two half days, or one whole day each week. However, if two colleagues opt for one day off on different days, they will only overlap for three days a week, leading to a necessary rise in asynchronous work.

But Cobry was in a fortuitous position because of its existing tools, Bryce says. “We have a really modern, cloud-based tech stack” that includes Asana for work management, Notion as a knowledge base, Hubspot for CRM, and Looker for business intelligence, all built around Google Workspace. With the addition of Google’s Gemini AI model to the mix, each component now has “a significant amount of genAI woven into it,” Bryce says.

Across this tech stack, AI is particularly helpful for documentation and lower-level tasks that free up employees for face-to-face tasks during shared working hours,  Bryce says. Cobry uses AI for transcribing meetings, writing strategy documents, and even information-sharing through special bots custom-written by Cobry. Available 24/7, the bots support asynchronous work by providing various pieces of data that are useful for internal teams, such as the latest updates from Google Cloud, a current list of who is on holiday, and even birthday announcements.

These use cases fall right in line with the four principles Cobry emphasizes to make the four-day workweek possible: automate, eliminate, outsource or delegate, and educate.

“With AI tools coming into play, we immediately had an incredibly powerful fifth method to facilitate a successful four-day week. We became able to progress, and often solve, issues that would previously have needed much more work and often the input of an external subject matter expert. Using AI tools closed many of those loops, and therefore made us more efficient,” he says.

More time to think — and grow the business

John Readman, CEO of Ask Bosco, a marketing AI company based in the UK, founded the business in 2019, implementing four-day workweeks from the get-go. The company allows employees to have Wednesday or Friday as a day off. He says that the rise of AI has helped the business grow without increasing headcount or staffers’ hours.

“We can actually win more business and still maintain the four-day week without having to recruit more people, so it’s meant our ability to produce more work within the time we’re working,” Readman says. AI tools have also improved “the quality of the work we’re doing, because we’ve got more time to think about it rather than just rushing it out the door,” he says.

The organization’s current applications for AI are diverse, including using ChatGPT and Midjourney for content production for search engine optimization; note-taking for meetings, which teams use to align their task lists and agendas; automated expense reporting for employees; and even voice cloning their tech experts so that the marketing team can create technical walkthroughs without recording audio.

AI has been so valuable to the company that Readman has actively solicited new AI use case ideas through a company-wide competition. Employees had to identify which tool would be used, how it would be used, and, perhaps most relevantly, how much time they expected to regain. Three winners received a cash prize for their ideas.

While Readman is bullish on rolling out AI and automation to every area of the organization, there is one area Ask Bosco will not touch. “We’re not using AI to monitor and watch what people are doing. I know some companies do that, but I think that’s sort of counterintuitive,” he says.

Facilitating information exchange

Safeguard Global, a workforce management software vendor headquartered in the United States, has a flexible work policy known as “work in any way.” This policy allows people to work how they want and when they want, says chief technology officer Duri Chitayat — and what they are measured by is what they deliver rather than how many hours they put in.

“Teams will establish a working agreement,” says Chitayat. “So, for example, one of my peers, a chief product officer, prefers to take off Fridays. I, on the other hand, like to use my Fridays for kind of spillover meetings.”

Chitayat says that AI supports work in any way because it lowers the time and effort spent to exchange information. Gathering the right data and getting it to the right people used to be a time-consuming process with various bottlenecks along the way. “AI strips the delay in information, the queuing of things in systems,” Chitayat says.

To this end, Safeguard uses a variety of genAI tools, including open-source projects like LangChain and LangGraph for agent orchestration, Vercel AI SDK for UX and developer experience, and LLMs from OpenAI and other vendors for natural language processing. The exact use cases vary — recruiting, knowledge management, workforce analytics, spend analytics, and client service management — but they all make the access and exchange of information more efficient.

In fact, information exchange has become so efficient that “highly skilled people — the place where you want to get the information to — those people become the new bottleneck,” Chitayat says. “They’re the wall socket that everything gets plugged into. AI just makes it easier to get them that stuff.”

The risk of this efficiency is that employees burn out and leave the organization. Flexible working arrangements, such as work-in-any-way or four-day workweeks, give people time to recharge, Chitayat says, and they’re more likely to stick around.

“By offering people an easier time, the ability to take a day when you need it, you’re messaging to people what you value, which is outcomes — not just showing up,” he says.

A valuable recruiting and retention tool

Flexible working is beneficial not just for employee retention, but for recruiting as well. Bryce calls Cobry’s four-day workweek a “joker card” to play against other firms.

“People are really, really shocked. They’re like, ‘Wow, what do you mean?’ I’ve had people not believe me in interviews. They think they have to take a 20% pay cut to get it,” he says.

This advantage has distinguished Cobry from other companies in a competitive market. “I don’t think there’s another Google Cloud partner that has the four-day week,” he says.

Ultimately, Cobry’s four-day work policy is an extension of its employee experience, Bryce says. “We’ve always been very careful about no work in the evenings, no work on the weekends and things like that. So I guess it was a further extension of that to try and really respect people’s lives and to give them a work-life balance,” he says.

In the era of hustle culture, one might assume that employees are using the extra time to freelance or work another job part-time. Readman has found otherwise at Ask Bosco. The company administered an anonymous general employee happiness survey and found that most people used the additional time off for “life admin” tasks like chores, errands, and other upkeep.

Readman says a four-day workweek helps both the organization and the employee. “That means you can enjoy your weekend, and then that helps with your mental health. And I also think that helps with being focused in the four days you’re working because you’re not thinking, ‘Ohh, I’ve got the man coming to fix the fridge or sort out the dishwasher whilst I’m meant to be on a call,’” he says.

The four-day week as a litmus test

Bryce says Cobry’s four-day workweek has been a barometer for the overall business.

“It’s almost like a magnifying glass to assess how well the business is operating in general,” he says. “It’s been a big driver in forcing focus: If this can’t be done in four days, how come? Is the process bad? Is everyone using their own tools? Is the person not skilled? You know, it’s very provocative,” he says.

Chitayat says that work-in-any-way has been similarly revelatory for Safeguard Global.

“The old way of hiring people and making sure they show up at the office is not a very good management tactic. It creates a lot of ‘success theater,’ whereas now what we’re focused on is data: What does the data tell us about our outcomes? Who’s succeeding? Who’s not? [We’re learning] how to ask the right questions, how to be able to get under the covers and find out why things are happening the way that they’re happening.” he says.

As a result, Chitayat says, more leaders are data-informed or data-driven.

Forrester’s Joseph says this data-driven approach can eventually help organizations that are not currently on four-day workweeks achieve that goal. He cited the example of an Indian company that Forrester works with. Although the company had a four-day workweek as a stated goal, they did not transition wholesale immediately. Instead, they launched a three-month pilot, asking both employees and clients for feedback.

At the end of the pilot, clients scored the firm’s output at more than 4 on a 5-point scale, and employee satisfaction scores rose from the usual 3.2 or 3.3 to well above 4. At that point the company made the four-day week permanent.

Joseph advises other businesses to consider the transition with a similarly pragmatic lens. “What should we be measuring? And how do the metrics that we’re collecting point to the impact of a four-day workweek on the long-term health across various metrics of our organization and of the employees?” he asks.

Organizations should not consider a four-day workweek in isolation but as part of a broader program to improve the employee experience across the board, Joseph says. And organizations should be deliberate about how they want work to happen.

He points to Amazon, which famously tries to minimize meetings by asking executives to articulate their thoughts in six-page memos rather than PowerPoints, as an example.

“These are all signals wherein organizations are shaping culture and aligning the tools — whether that be collaboration tools or automation tools or AI tools — around those objectives to create a certain work environment where people can come in, be their best at work, be their most productive in what they’re doing, and then maybe do things with the extra time that they save,” he says. “You have to look at all this holistically.”