As artificial intelligence grows increasingly integrated into global workplaces and its capabilities advance at an unprecedented pace, OpenAI, the developer of the widely used ChatGPT platform, has laid out a series of people-first policy recommendations urging employers across industries to test the feasibility of a four-day workweek with no corresponding cut to worker pay.
Outlined in OpenAI’s new policy paper *Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age*, the proposals are framed as a starting point for urgent global discussions on how societies can adapt to the coming AI transformation— a shift the company acknowledges will bring widespread benefits to productivity and innovation, but also significant disruptive change to existing labor markets and career trajectories.
OpenAI argues that ongoing advances in AI are rapidly cutting down the time required to complete many common work tasks, bringing a full transition to advanced AI systems into closer view than many policymakers and business leaders anticipate. “If progress continues, we can expect systems to be capable of carrying out projects that currently take people months,” the report notes, adding that this seismic shift will fundamentally reorganize how companies operate, how knowledge is generated, and how workers access meaningful employment and economic opportunity.
Beyond the push for four-day workweek pilots, OpenAI has put forward a suite of additional policy and business recommendations. It calls for incentivizing companies to deliver long-lasting improvements to worker benefits, including higher retirement contributions, expanded healthcare coverage, and subsidized childcare. The company also recommends expanding job opportunities in people-centric sectors that are less vulnerable to AI displacement, such as early childhood education, childcare, and public healthcare. OpenAI adds that its initial set of proposals is primarily targeted at policymakers and business leaders in the United States, with the goal of jumpstarting broader global conversations about proactive governance of AI growth.
The recommendations come amid ongoing, fierce debate over how AI will reshape global labor markets over the coming decades. Last December, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned that AI-driven job displacement could mirror the massive labor upheaval seen during the first Industrial Revolution, which displaced millions of traditional agricultural and craft workers over a century. This is not the first time a major AI developer has laid out a vision for social and economic policy changes to manage AI’s growing impact; OpenAI’s proposal to create a public wealth fund that would give all citizens a direct stake in AI-driven economic growth echoes nearly identical policy ideas released by competing AI firm Anthropic last October. Anthropic’s framework also called for upgrading worker training programs to prepare people for emerging AI-era jobs and expanding energy and computing infrastructure to support sustained AI development.
Despite the warnings of widespread disruption from major AI developers, many economic analysts argue that AI’s transformative impact on jobs, productivity, and the broader economy may be much further off than tech leaders claim. In a recent research note, Adam Slater, lead economist at Oxford Economics, pointed out that most scenarios predicting rapid, transformative AI growth rely on overly optimistic assumptions about productivity gains and the speed of global AI adoption. Slater noted that while past waves of technological innovation have delivered large long-term productivity gains, these improvements often take decades to materialize across the broader economy, and can slow far more quickly than early projections predict.
As the global AI development race accelerates—with companies pouring billions into research into even advanced systems, including hypothetical “superintelligence” that could outperform humans on most cognitive tasks— the debate over how to shape policy to mitigate harm and share AI’s benefits continues to intensify. Readers can follow the latest technology trends and breaking AI news by signing up for *Tech Decoded*, the weekly newsletter covering the global tech sector.