ChatGPT will lead to four-day week, says recruitment chief


Gareth Corfield
Mon, 28 August 2023 

businessmen with bowler hats and briefcases marching to illustrate worker productivity

Artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT will open the door to a four-day week and French-style working practices, the boss of one of the world’s biggest recruiters has said.

Jean “JC” Townend, president of Adecco in the UK and Ireland, said that chatbots are expected to increase such significant productivity gains that the working week could be shortened as a result.

She said: “I would put my money on ChatGPT giving us a four-day week.


“If you can get computers to do the really repetitive, boring parts of jobs that humans don’t like to do, then you can put the human on top to do the really creative, interesting parts.

“Productivity means either higher salaries or it means the ability to work less and receive the same salary.”

Britain is facing a productivity crisis with the UK at risk of being overtaken by the rest of the world in terms of living standards.

On current projections Poland will overtake the UK’s gross domestic product by 2030, as the country transforms itself into a tech and manufacturing powerhouse.

In 2021, an American worker was 26pc more productive than their British counterpart, producing $74.80 (£58.30) per hour worker versus $59.20 per hour for a UK worker.

Fears of the impact of a four-day working week on productivity have already led to crackdowns on the public sector.

A Cambridgeshire council was ordered to stop its four-day week experiment in June after local government minister Lee Rowley warned the authority it was potentially breaking laws that guarantee services for local residents.

Yet Adecco’s Ms Townend suggested a four-day week could lead to French-style labour market practices.

She said: “If you have a four-day working week we get what happened in France.

“When they changed the working hours laws more people went into the workforce, and people also took on extra jobs. So it actually increased the demand for jobs.”

Unemployment in France is running at 7.2pc, compared with 4.2pc in the UK.

ChatGPT itself faces growing challenges as public interest in the technology wanes. Software developers, seen as a key customer demographic for AI-powered productivity enhancement services, are turning their backs on it.

A third of UK developers do not trust the accuracy of AI tools, according to a recent survey by developer website Stack Overflow.

Two in five developers do not plan on using the technology at all, despite it powering services such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot code-writing AI, one of the Big Tech company’s flagship AI products.