AI may advance productivity, but will it give us more time?

When technology allows us to produce more value in less time, who should benefit?

Artificial intelligence is forcing Canada to confront that question today. Unlike previous waves of automation, AI is arriving across nearly every profession at once.

It is already helping lawyers draft contracts, engineers write code, and analysts interpret data in a fraction of the time once required. AI is rapidly becoming part of everyday work.

For years, economists have warned that Canada’s weak productivity growth threatens future prosperity. Artificial intelligence is already proving to be one of the most significant productivity advances in generations. But productivity alone has never guaranteed broader prosperity; it has only created the opportunity to improve people’s lives.

A century ago, the weekend was widely dismissed as unrealistic. Critics warned that shorter hours would weaken competitiveness and economic growth. Instead, the weekend, the eight-hour workday, and paid vacation became enduring institutions because societies recognized that rising productivity should improve life beyond the workplace.

Productivity is not an end in itself. It is a promise that each generation should have the opportunity to live better than the one before it.

Yet, technology itself will not determine who benefits most from it.

We will.

If AI enables someone to complete four hours of work in one, an employer may simply expect four times as much output. 

Across an economy, however, that raises a larger question. Should every productivity gain become additional work? Or should some of those gains eventually be returned to Canadians in another form?

Technological progress carried an implicit promise: as we became more productive, we would gain more time. Yet email, smartphones, and collaboration platforms have often turned efficiency into faster responses, higher expectations, and more work.

That disconnect is about more than work. It is about the kind of country we want to build.

Housing is less affordable, family formation is being delayed, caregivers are stretched, and burnout is commonplace. None of these challenges has a single cause, but together they point to a growing shortage of something essential: time.

Time to raise children, care for aging parents, volunteer, pursue new opportunities, and simply recover.

We have measured technological progress largely through output, profits, and GDP. Those measures matter, but they tell only part of the story. 

Perhaps we should measure technological progress not only by the wealth it creates, but by the time it returns. This is the time dividend: returning a meaningful share of productivity gains to Canadians in the form of time.

The principle matters more than the mechanism. The idea is bigger than any single policy. A time dividend will not look the same everywhere.

Depending on the workplace, it could mean a four-day week, greater flexibility, additional leave, fewer administrative burdens, or phased retirement.

A four-day workweek with no reduction in pay is one compelling example. As AI enables workers to accomplish far more in less time, the case for sharing some of those productivity gains grows stronger. Canada should test such models through pilot projects and evidence; large-scale trials have found that many participating employers chose to continue after the pilot. 

The point is not to prescribe one model, but to recognize that AI has changed the conversation.

Every major productivity revolution forces society to answer the same question: what is all of this progress ultimately for?

For more than two centuries, technological progress has been measured primarily by what it allows us to produce. Artificial intelligence invites us to ask a different question. What should it allow us to become? A more productive country? Certainly. But perhaps also a healthier, more connected, and more resilient one.

AI may become one of the greatest engines of productivity in history. Whether it also advances quality of life will depend on the choices governments, employers, and workers make together. Just as previous generations shaped the future of work, so will ours.

The people who gave us the weekend did not reject productivity. They redefined what it was for.

If productivity is a promise that each generation should live better than the one before it, how do we ensure that promise is kept?

Perhaps the answer is not simply to produce more, but to return a meaningful share of that progress in the form of something increasingly valuable.

Time.

Jacob Beaulieu works in the federal public service in data analytics and public sector modernization. He writes about public policy, artificial intelligence, productivity and the future of work.

The Hill Times