Jamie Dimon predicts AI will shorten the work week: ‘My guess is the developed world will work three and a half days a week’
And at the America Business Forum in Miami on Thursday, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase sketched a provocative horizon: AI will optimize our work schedules over our lifetimes.
“This is going to affect every application, every job, every customer interface,” Dimon said. “I think the developed world will be working three and a half days a week in 20, 30, 40 years and have a wonderful life.”
He doesn’t talk about hypotheses. Dimon transformed JPMorgan into a live-fire AI lab. About 2,000 people build AI systems; approximately 150,000 employees use large language models on internal documents every week; and the bank has hundreds of use cases in progress, from fraud detection and legal review to reconciliations and marketing optimization.
Dimon’s three-and-a-half-day forecast depends on this cumulative productivity. As AI absorbs routine work, the same result may require fewer hours. But he is adamant: the transition will not be painless.
“It will kill jobs. People should stop burying their heads in the sand,” he warned at the press conference. Fortune Conference of Most Influential Women, arguing that businesses and governments must plan for career retraining, income support, redeployment and, in some cases, early retirement to avoid social backlash. The bank, he declared, is being built in this spirit of redeployment.
He also points out that the economics of AI are not the same as those of the Internet. Construction is both capital and power intensive; Some high-profile projects “won’t get the traction they need,” he said. Investors should underwrite data centers and AI infrastructure on a deal-by-deal basis, he added, clarifying who has revenue, who takes construction and technology risks, and what happens if the chips or factories don’t work, rather than buying the theme wholesale. In his words: Some AI efforts will be done “in a bubble,” but overall the technology “will probably pay off.”
Dimon has a consistent message to operators: stop overintellectualizing model theology and deploy it.
“Use it…in any business,” he said.
JPMorgan is even holding AI master classes for senior executives after finding that many of the company’s leaders simply didn’t know what current tools could already do (one reaction Dimon cited was, “I didn’t know it could read 100,000 documents.”).
Overall, the future of work may be shorter in hours but richer in value, if leaders are doing the hard part now. That means modernizing the data so AI can actually use it (“We spend a lot of money to put the data in the right format… We don’t measure how much it costs,” Dimon said), investing in power constraints and building human outputs for roles that will disappear.
Dimon’s bet is that what machines suppress, well-managed institutions can redo: and this is how we arrive at a three and a half day week without blowing up the social contract.
“You know, technology has downsides. It’s used by bad people,” Dimon said at the Forum. “But accept it.”
