While some tech companies try to get their employees back to the office five days a week, others believe that, with the help of A.I., employees may soon not have to work that much. “Very soon, maybe in the next 20 years or maybe sooner, we won’t need to work for five days,” Eric Yuan, CEO and co-founder of the video conferencing company Zoom, said today (Sept. 25) while speaking at the Concordia Summit in New York. As the new technology becomes widely adopted, four-day work weeks will become the norm, with workers logging 32 hours instead of the traditional 40, he said. “That will become reality.”
This isn’t the first time Yuan has touted the productivity potential of A.I. Earlier this year, he told The Verge that Zoom will eventually use the technology to create a “digital twin” that can “go to Zoom meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you while you spend your time on more important things, like your family.” These digital avatars, which will mimic users so well that “you can’t know if it’s a real person or just a 3D person,” will take calls, answer emails and do other grunt work, allowing employees to cut their work weeks by a day or two, he said.
Other business leaders have made similar predictions. Billionaires Ray Dalio and Richard Branson have both suggested that A.I. will make shorter work weeks a reality, while Steve Cohen, the head of Point72 Asset Management, in April told CNBC that four-day work weeks are “an eventuality.”
Zoom is building “an A.I.-first” platform
Yuan, who currently has an estimated net worth of $4.4 billion, worked at Cisco and WebEx before founding Zoom in 2011. The San Jose, Calif.-based company skyrocketed in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, with its daily users rising from 10 million at the end of 2019 to nearly 350 million by March 2020, according to Yuan. The company is still profitable, having reported a net income of $219 million on $1.1 billion of revenue during the latest quarter. But growth has slowed since its Covid-19 heyday, with the company’s share price falling by 86 percent from its peak in late 2020.
As Zoom repositions itself amid a new environment, A.I. is at the forefront. “We are way more than just video conferencing tools,” said Yuan at the Concordia Summit. “We are building an A.I.-first work and learning platform.” The company was investing in A.I. even before OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the tech world by storm in late 2022, Yuan added.
The company has introduced a slew of A.I.-powered features in recent months through its A.I. Companion tool. The generative A.I. assistant, included at no cost for customers of paid Zoom accounts, can summarize meetings, compose chats, generate project ideas and complete text in documents. “Almost everywhere, we think about how to leverage A.I.,” said Yuan.
The Zoom CEO’s optimism doesn’t mean the company’s adoption of A.I. has occurred without a hitch. Given the technology’s potential impact on society, Yuan said regulation and caution are required. He recalled the company’s rollout of its virtual background generation feature, which was introduced in August but was initially scheduled for release a few months prior. After running an internal test that unveiled some biases in the feature, Zoom “took a step back to spend more time in data training to make sure it’s very inclusive,” he said. “Internally, we realized we have to take a very responsible approach—not only for privacy and security, but A.I. as well.”