Yahoo Finance AI could enable a 4-day work week for a quarter of Canadians: Report
Twenty-five per cent of the Canadian workforce could move to a four-day work week in the next decade by taking advantage of productivity gains made possible by artificial intelligence (AI), a new report says.
The report “captures the potential for AI and advancements in new technologies to lead to not just a more productive economy, but one that offers people a greater quality of life,” said Joe O’Connor, CEO of the Work Time Reduction Centre of Excellence (WTRCoE), in an interview with Yahoo Finance Canada.
WTRCoE collaborated on the report, titled GPT-4(Day Week), with U.K. research group Autonomy, both advocates for working time reform. O’Connor says the source data and conclusions about productivity gains come from impartial, reputed sources that “hold up pretty clearly,” and the report’s arguments are around what comes next.
“Then it becomes a choice,” O’Connor said. “And if it becomes a choice, do we bank all of those productivity gains against the bottom line or against cost savings such as job reductions or do we design a model societally and economically where that benefit is shared and distributed more equitably between corporations and the workforce?”
The report matches Canadian government workforce data and forecasts with indices used by the International Monetary Fund to quantify the impact of AI on different sectors, and uses productivity models published by Goldman Sachs to estimate possible gains.
It finds that more than 90 per cent of the Canadian workforce could have its working hours reduced by 10 per cent with the adoption of large language models (the technology used for AI applications such as ChatGPT) in the workplace by 2034. And around a quarter of Canadians could move to a 32-hour week without any loss in productivity, in sectors with a higher potential for AI augmentation.
Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Alberta, and Nova Scotia have the highest proportion of workers who could work four-day weeks, the report says.
A Statistics Canada document observes that average annual working hours declined from 1997 to 2022, but productivity grew, supporting the argument that productivity is not only about time spent. Some critics say four-day week plans favour white-collar workers and others who already have an economic advantage. But O’Connor says the AI gains could have broad application.
“If you take healthcare, it’s often a sector that people look at and they say, it couldn't happen,” he said. “But in most healthcare sectors and services globally, there is a significant volume of work which is administrative which is about managing the kind of scheduling and the arrangements of care where actually AI tools and technologies could make a real difference.”
John MacFarlane is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow him on Twitter @jmacf. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.
