Forget the Four-Day Week. What Happens When AI Does a Third of Your Job?

At Employee Benefits Live 2026, conversations about AI, fair pay, childcare and employee wellbeing led me to a question for HR and reward leaders: if AI frees up 12 hours of someone’s working week, does that time belong to the employer or the employee?

Last week I went to Employee Benefits Live 2026 at ExCeL London, walking the exhibition floor and listening to the conversations shaping the future of reward.

Across four stages — Future of Work, Whole Person Wellbeing, Employee Experience & Engagement, and Better Benefits, Smarter Spend — the event explored everything from AI and regulatory change to reproductive health, financial wellbeing and making reward budgets work harder.

Two sessions stood out: one on how AI changes jobs, another on what people need from reward and benefits. Together, they raised a bigger question.

If technology helps someone do five days’ work in three and a half, who gets the remaining time?

AI is changing the work, not just the speed

In AI at work: building trust, confidence and opportunity in a changing workplace, Fabio Sacoman, vice president of learning and development at Expedia Group, described three levels of AI adoption: people understanding the company’s ambition, finding ways to use AI in their own roles, and finally redesigning how whole teams work.

An AI assistant might help someone write a report faster. Redesigning work might remove the report altogether, change who makes a decision or transform an entire process.

Dr Laura Weis, a human–AI strategy specialist, explored how AI is changing the value of different tasks and skills. She also brought attention to the space created by efficiency: time for better relationships, fresh thinking and work that requires human judgment.

Lorna Leeson of 7 Seas Culture Consultancy emphasized trust and cultural alignment. Employees need to understand where change is leading and what it means for them. Carolyn Shepherd, founder of Emmeline AI, reinforced the importance of building people’s confidence to use the technology well.

AI transformation depends on employees helping to make it happen. What do they get in return?

Who owns the 12 hours?

Imagine someone working a 40-hour week who, with AI, can produce the same quality and volume of work in 28 hours. The 30% saving is hypothetical but we’re using it as an example.

The question is, should those 12 hours be filled with more work? Could they be used for learning, innovation or customer relationships? Or should the employee be able to finish early, collect their children, go for a walk or put their feet up because their work is done?

I’ve been cogitating over this since the event and I think the answer depends partly on who created the saving.

Suppose the employer has invested in AI licenses, change management, training and redesigned processes. It is reasonable for the organization to expect a return through greater capacity, improved service or better results. In this case, the saving does belong to the employer, alongside the responsibility to look at engaging the employee through change, and dealing with resulting OD changes.

Now consider an employee who spots the opportunity themselves. They pay for a tool, spend their own time learning it and work out how to complete their responsibilities much faster, provided that use is permitted under their employer’s AI and data policies. Their initiative has created value. If every hour they free up is immediately replaced with another hour of work, what incentive do they have to keep finding better ways to do things?

There is a strong argument that this employee deserves a share of the gain. They do not automatically acquire the contractual right to leave 12 hours early, but HR should ask what a fair return on employee-led innovation looks like.

Most workplaces will sit somewhere between those examples. Businesses provide systems, time and support; employees contribute ideas, effort and judgment. The value is often created together. The answer may be to share it.

We’ve already explored the challenge of measuring real AI impact in our reporting on how Meta is changing work. Hours saved are a starting point. Employers also need to know whether the work is accurate, useful and genuinely finished.

Reward has always been about more than money

This connected directly with a second session from Cecilia Crossley, founder of Uplifting People and host of the How HR Leaders Change the World podcast.

Drawing on more than 250 conversations with chief HR officers, Crossley explored three themes: fair pay, benefits that respond to people’s real lives, and reward decisions that reflect an organization’s purpose.

She highlighted Project Hope at Lloyds Banking Group, which creates employment opportunities for care-experienced young people. For someone without a financial safety net, the wait for a first paycheck can be a serious problem. Bringing that payment forward may make more difference than adding another perk.

She discussed the significance of fair pay in sectors employing large numbers of women in lower-paid roles, and Sony Music UK’s childcare support scheme, which offers eligible parents salary-tapered contributions of up to £15,000 a year for preschool childcare. It can determine whether someone can afford to stay in work.

Then came KFC’s examples of protecting employees’ time, from virtual commutes to earlier Friday finishes. Its published benefits include 1 p.m. Friday finishes for eligible roles. Here, time already forms part of the reward proposition.

Crossley’s wider point was practical: reward leaders can make meaningful changes by understanding the pressures people face, bringing the right colleagues together and changing one policy or practice that matters.

Could time become the next big employee benefit?

So when putting these together, the common thread really is all about our time.

Reward teams would have important questions to settle. If AI is saving time, can some of it be given back to employees with shorter Fridays, more time off, greater flexibility. How do we make the offer fair to frontline colleagues whose work cannot be compressed so easily? What level of quality and availability must employees maintain? How do we recognize personal initiative while keeping AI tools secure and approved? And how do we make sure an apparent time saving is real, rather than work simply being passed to someone else?

Those are questions HR, reward and benefits professionals are well placed to answer. They already design the arrangements that determine how people share in an organization’s success.

AI discussions often focus on what employers gain: productivity, growth and lower costs. Employee Benefits Live reminded me that the employee side deserves equal attention. Because if we don’t spell it out in our change programmes, and employees don’t see the ‘what’s in it for me’, they may be less inclined to join the journey, or more anxious and less productive going through it.

So this for me is the most important question to be debated in businesses this year as AI adoption takes hold. When employers and employees make work more efficient together, both should have a say in how the benefit is shared. So what should this look like?