Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and Elon Musk have all made the same prediction in recent years: the work week is about to shrink. Automation will take over routine tasks, they argue, freeing up workers’ time and pushing the four-day week to become standard. Gates even floated the idea of a two-day week.
But Mark Dixon, CEO and founder of the International Workplace Group (IWG), doesn’t buy that idea. From his point of view, as the leader of the largest flexible office provider in the world — with more than 8 million users in 122 countries and 85% of Fortune 500 companies among its customers — the math doesn’t add up.
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“Everyone is focused on productivity, so it won’t be any time soon,” says Dixon bluntly.
“It’s a labor cost issue,” Dixon explains to Fortune. The United States and the United Kingdom face significant cost-of-living crises. At the same time, according to him, companies are experiencing an “operational cost crisis”.
“Everyone needs to control labor costs because all the expenses have gone up so much, and you can’t get more money out of customers, so you have to get more out of people.”
Essentially, companies cannot afford to pay the same wages for fewer hours, nor pass the difference on to customers. Thus, any time “freed up” by automation is much more likely to be filled with new tasks than returned to workers.
AI can create more work, not less
Silicon Valley’s most vocal voices present AI as a path to more leisure. The richest person in the world and head of SpaceX, Tesla and X, Elon Musk, even predicted that work will be completely “optional” and more like a hobby in just 10 years.
In practice, Dixon suggests, this scenario would only happen if there wasn’t enough work to go around, and not because bosses would suddenly become benevolent. But in their eyes, AI will likely create more—not less—work.
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Every major technological change, he argues, has followed a similar arc: fear of substitution, followed by an expansion of opportunity.
“AI will accelerate the development of companies, so there will be more work; it will just be different work,” he says.
In 19th-century Britain, Dixon recalls, English textile workers protested against new automated machines, fearing they would threaten their livelihoods, reduce wages and deskill their craft during the Industrial Revolution. They became known as Luddites.
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“They went around the country destroying the looms to stop progress. But in the end, you’ve heard about the Industrial Revolution. That’s what came out of those looms and factory production.” As mass production made goods more affordable, retail grew; more managers were needed to supervise the machines; the middle class grew, and so on.
Similarly, there was palpable fear when computers came into force in the 1980s. The 1996 book “Women and Computers” described people fearing becoming “slaves” to machines and feeling aggressive toward computers.
But since the explosion of the PC (and then the internet, the cloud, social media, and so on), most professions have undergone a digital makeover—rather than simply disappearing.
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Writers now use a laptop instead of a typewriter; designers rely on Adobe Photoshop instead of pen and paper; and a multitude of IT roles have been created along the way.
“Progress is impossible to stop,” concludes Dixon.
“Companies need to do what companies need to do, and it’s really important for young people coming into the market to put a little more effort into choosing the right jobs, the right path, getting extra skills in things like AI. Whatever job you’re going to do, you have to be good at technology.”
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