The pitch for artificial intelligence has been remarkably consistent: let the machines handle the drudgery, and people will get their time back. But according to a BBC Technology report, the companies making that promise are not living by it.
The BBC found that while tech leaders publicly argue AI means less work, staff inside those same companies report working up to 90 hours a week. The BBC's framing is blunt — tech companies are not modelling their own claims about the technology giving people more free time.
That gap between the sales pitch and the shop floor is the whole story. A 90-hour week is more than double a standard full-time schedule, and it is being clocked at precisely the organisations best positioned to demonstrate that AI shortens the working day. If the tools genuinely compressed the labour required to build software and ship products, the firms building those tools would presumably be the first to feel it.
There are a few ways to read this. AI may be raising output expectations rather than reducing hours — faster work simply meaning more work assigned. Or the industry's intense competitive race to build AI systems may be overwhelming any efficiency the systems deliver. The BBC report highlights the contradiction rather than resolving it, and the source material here does not settle which explanation is right.
What it does establish is that the most visible evidence available — how AI's own builders spend their weeks — currently points the other way from the marketing.
This matters because the promise of shorter hours is being used to sell AI to employers, governments and workers worldwide, and the first real-world test of that promise is not going the way its advocates suggest.