Technology leaders at companies investing heavily in artificial intelligence development have long maintained that the technology will eventually reduce working hours for employees. A Google engineering director predicted a four-day work week by 2025, and earlier this year, OpenAI formally encouraged companies to trial reduced schedules, arguing that AI capabilities would soon enable significant productivity gains. However, accounts from current and former employees at these same companies paint a starkly different picture.
Former employees at OpenAI describe a work culture characterized by frequent crisis meetings, weekend work, and competitive performance reviews, despite the company’s public advocacy for shorter work weeks. Workers at OpenAI and Anthropic report clocking 70 to 90 hours per week during intensive project sprints, which can stretch for many weeks. At Meta, employees describe being “drafted” onto AI teams without choice, working late into nights and weekends while feeling perpetually on-call. A former Google employee cited the company’s reallocation of computing resources to AI projects as a contributing factor to increased nighttime work and stress.
Research from UC Berkeley examining tech workers over eight months found that employees using AI tools “worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day.” Rather than reducing workload, the technology appears to have expanded it. Workers must frequently verify AI-generated outputs, and any time savings tend to be absorbed by new tasks and implementation requirements. MIT innovation scholar Neil Thompson noted that even at leading AI companies, workers are unlikely to simply deploy tools and reduce their schedules; instead, time savings get consumed by integration work and proving value to employers.
The disconnect between executive predictions and worker experiences highlights a broader pattern in tech employment, where increased efficiency has historically resulted in expanded workloads rather than reduced hours. As one former employee observed, AI was supposed to improve workers’ health and sleep, but instead the opposite appears to be occurring.
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