In a new report from OpenAI, the AI giant and creator of LLM ChatGPT, has made the suggestion that employers trial a four day work week in the face of AI tools creating major productivity and efficiency gains.
The Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First report gives suggestions on how society should manage the economic and social transition towards AI models becoming ever more sophisticated, and eventually reaching a hypothetical stage of ‘superintelligence’.
The AI giant claims that AI systems could soon handle months of human work. To mitigate the impact of these time and money savings, the company suggests employers experiment with a shorter workweek such as a 32-hour week with no loss in pay.
The paper says that employers should be incentivised by governments to “run time-bound 32-hour/four-day workweek pilots with no loss in pay that hold output and service levels constant, then convert reclaimed hours into a permanent shorter week, bankable paid time off, or both.”
The report frames access to AI as a basic utility and calls for universal access to AI tools. It also suggests the creation of a ‘Public Wealth Fund’ as a means to redistribute AI wealth directly to citizens, and proposes the idea of taxing AI driven gains to sustain welfare initiatives.
The report claims that AI is a technology as transformational as electricity, giving way to faster scientific discoveries, high levels of productivity, and new industries being formed.
At the same time, the paper acknowledges that job disruption, inequality, misuse, and a loss of control of AI systems stand as significant possible risks.
The Real AI Cost and Time Savings
It might seem an obvious statement that companies have the capacity to save significant time and money through using AI tools.
FMCG brand Unilever claims its Beauty AI Studio, its AI-powered in-house content system, has enabled the company to produce creative assets up to 30 percent faster than before
Streamer Netflix made headlines in 2025 after confirming its first use of GenAI in a finished production, using the technology to create a building collapse scene in its Argentine sci-fi series The Eternaut — completing the sequence around ten times faster than traditional methods and at a fraction of the usual cost.
Despite this, there remains skepticism about the real value of AI in a business context, with few companies reporting overall gains and return-on-investment.
A now highly-referenced MIT report from last year claimed that 95 percent of GenAI pilots fail to deliver ROI, and that despite AI tools having the capacity to create significant gains, challenges around implementation and poor data quality play a notable role in initiatives succeeding.
The MIT report also claims that AI funds are often misallocated to marketing and sales, over ‘back-office’ jobs – like admin roles – where gains are most significant.
