Scale AI and Passes founder Lucy Guo says AI is making people work harder, not less: ‘I worked a 26-hour day’

Lucy Guo helped build one of AI’s biggest names, but she’s not selling the usual productivity fairy tale. In a Fortune Daily Show interview this week, the Scale AI cofounder and Passes CEO said AI can actually push people to work harder, not easier. Her line was blunt: if your agents are running, someone still has to stay awake for them. She said that meant a recent 26-hour day for her, after she refused to sleep.

That sounds extreme, but it fits the way Guo has always worked. She became a billionaire by 30 after selling Scale AI to Meta, and she has kept her foot on the gas since leaving the company in 2018. Through Backend Capital, she has backed startups, including one unnamed company that was later acquired by Anthropic, leaving her a “pretty large shareholder” in the AI company. She also runs Passes, which she founded in 2022.

Her point lands because it cuts against the neat pitch around AI. Yes, some developers are using it to finish tasks faster. But early research is already showing the catch: faster output can turn into broader job scopes and longer hours. A UC Berkeley study of a 200-person U.S. tech company found employees moved faster, took on more tasks, and stretched work later into the day, often without being asked.

Guo still isn’t anti-human. She said the people in a company matter most, and that hiring or investing means spotting complementary skills. She also said her two years studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon gave her enough baseline knowledge to recognize strong engineers, even if she considered herself average. The bigger message is less about machines replacing workers than about managers and founders quietly using machines to squeeze more out of the same people.