Xiaomi’s Lei Jun floats three-day workweek in the “AI era,” igniting debate in China’s tech scene

The remark

Xiaomi (小米) founder and CEO Lei Jun (雷军) reportedly said that in the coming “Artificial Intelligence Era,” people may only need to work three days a week, according to ifeng (凤凰网). He framed AI as a sweeping productivity engine that could compress working hours while raising output. The comments arrive as Xiaomi touts AI across its smartphones, smart-home devices, and its nascent electric vehicle business.

Why it matters

China’s tech industry is synonymous with the “996” culture—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. A three-day week would be a dramatic reversal. The idea echoes global trials of four-day workweeks, but goes further and faces a harsher competitive reality: slowing growth, razor-thin margins, and relentless timelines that have historically pushed firms to demand more hours, not fewer. Could AI truly flip that script?

Xiaomi’s AI push—and constraints

Xiaomi is among the world’s top smartphone vendors and has rolled out HyperOS with on-device AI assistants that tie together phones, wearables, and home gadgets; it also entered autos with the SU7 sedan in 2024. Yet geopolitical headwinds persist. U.S. export controls continue to restrict Chinese access to the most advanced AI chips for cloud-scale training, nudging companies toward lighter, on-device models and aggressive software optimization rather than frontier model development.

The takeaway

It has been reported that Lei’s vision is as much a narrative as a roadmap: AI as societal uplift, not just a feature set. Whether a three-day week materializes soon is doubtful. But the message is clear. China’s consumer-electronics champion wants to position itself—and its AI stack—as a lever for productivity gains big enough to challenge the country’s entrenched long-hours norm. Skeptics will ask: can a company forged in 996 lead the charge to 3/7?