The days of grinding at your desk from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. are officially numbered. Imagine clocking off an hour earlier every single day and still taking home the same salary. Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban says artificial intelligence is about to make it happen.
“Smart, bigger companies will enable their employees to create and use agents (within security guardrails), improve their productivity,” Cuban just wrote on X. “But most importantly, they will reduce their workday by an hour to start. Same pay.”
He added that working from home already “dilutes” people’s start and finish time, but that forward-thinking companies will put an official policy in place that cuts the workweek down by at least 5 hours. “It’s a step that sets the tone in a company,” he added.
“Reward people doing the daily with more time.”
It’s a bold call—but Cuban, who built and sold Broadcast.com (“the YouTube” of his era) for $5.7 billion and has backed hundreds of companies on Shark Tank, has a track record of spotting workplace shifts before the mainstream catches up.
He even taught fellow self-made multimillionaire Emma Grede—the founder behind Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Khloé Kardashian’s Good American—how to make the most of AI early on. He had over 60 AI apps on his phone at the time. So he knows more than most how many hours these tools can claw back.
And his argument is that the smartest companies will give that time back to their workers.
The 40-hour workweek launched 100 years ago—and it’s no longer fit for purpose
The standard 9-to-5 schedule hasn’t had an overhaul since Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Henry Ford brought the 40-hour workweek to the Western world a century ago, in 1926—eight hours of labor, for eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. At the time, it was a 19th-century worker’s dream.
However, between commutes, school runs, and last-minute holdbacks in the office, it took the world shutting down to realize that 8-8-8 had slowly morphed back to something more like 12-6-6. Working from home briefly allowed workers to claw back some of that time. Families ate breakfast together again. Parents walked their children to school. That mismatch between productivity and presenteeism became impossible to ignore, and post-pandemic workers simply refused to go back “to normal”.
Already, office staff is crafting informal “dead zones”—hours or even days when they’ve unofficially checked out.
Studies show productivity plummets between 4 and 6 p.m. as employees slip into COVID-era habits of gym runs and school pickups. Many have also quietly dropped Fridays, echoing America’s Got Talent judge Simon Cowell, who recently said he stopped working them altogether because they were “pointless.” Emails get left unanswered, and the few still at their desks can’t get a meeting in the diary.
Now, with governments around the world once again pushing remote work and even four-day workweeks in the wake of the war in Iran, the pressure on the traditional workweek is building from every direction. And for workers already stretched thin by stagnating wages, “peanut butter” raises and a cost of living that keeps climbing, an hour back every single day—with no dent to their paycheck—isn’t just a perk. It’d be the first real raise many will have seen in years.
