In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted productivity would eventually shrink the workweek to about 15 hours. We're still waiting. In a new Forbes Council article, Bureau CEO Tyson Gundersen has some thoughts on why.
The argument: "Productivity" was built for factory floors, where more output from the same inputs is easy to count. Knowledge work doesn't behave that way. An hour can produce nothing, and ten minutes can change a company's direction. Most metrics measure work after it happens and rarely ask what made it possible.
Zoom in: AI is running the Keynes experiment again, only faster. Economists at Stanford and MIT found AI assistance raised support agents' resolution rates by 30% for novice and lower-skilled workers. The catch is that saved time almost never becomes free time. It just gets refilled.
The alternative: Watch people, not deliverables.
- Notice who colleagues go to when a problem gets messy.
- Notice the analyst booking a meeting room just to be alone, or the engineer arriving at 7 a.m. for two quiet hours. They're telling you what your workplace makes hard.
Why it matters: A team can hit every deadline and still be running on fumes. Tyson's practical fix is to decide where saved time goes before the tool saves it, and to retire a meeting or report each time a tool takes over a task.
