As a 46-year-old executive who now has both people and AI agents reporting to me on the org chart, I think corporate America needs to revive a much-mocked relic of mid-century American business life: the three-martini lunch.
In 1978, Gerald Ford called the ritual “the epitome of American efficiency”, asking: “Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?” He meant it as a joke, but in 2026, I think it should be our strategic plan.
Anyone can generate output using technology, but the three-martini lunch was a singular opportunity to mix business and pleasure, a phenomenon that is increasingly missing during the AI revolution.
My job in corporate marketing makes me feel like a modern-day Don Draper equivalent, though my life isn’t all sly smiles, dirty olives and three-piece suits. It’s hard to get people out to lunch these days, as our workload demands are sky-high in a world where management expects AI agents to increase our productivity almost instantly. I haven’t yet enjoyed any of this “free time” the bot was meant to add to my day.
When I started in the business in the early 2000s, long lunches were slightly more common. A sales vendor would ask for a casual meeting, and I’d saunter to a Smith & Wollensky-type establishment and pick at a chicken cobb salad while chatting about the weather, family and eventually, a pitch. There was a softness to the approach, and I actually made lasting friendships over the decades with a handful of clients and vendors, whether we continued to work together or not.
Today, I’m more likely to build connections over a Teams chat or fleeting video call than in real life. We work long hours, constantly measuring our capacity to do more with increased demands in an environment where it seems like everyone can quicken their output with a prompt, an agent, a workflow.
Long ago, I absorbed the ethos that anything I did at a pace perceived to be leisurely would probably not make for a successful resume. Taking the time to go out to a long lunch felt like it would land me a performance improvement plan rather than a promotion. This thinking was shared by others and fed our current loneliness epidemic.
I should have been asking myself: who is going to tell me how to stylishly tuck my button-down shirt into my jeans? Where will I get the anecdote about who leaned into the mini bar a little too hard on the last business trip? Who is going to give me a look to stop talking in a meeting? A sycophantic robot is not up to these tasks.
As we’ve largely abandoned the desire to saunter through meals to our own detriment, I wondered how we lost touch with such an intrinsic way of doing business.
The phrase “three-martini lunch” first surfaced in a 1950 newspaper column as a casual observation describing the excesses of New York professional life. In 1976, Jimmy Carter wielded it as a weapon, arguing that working-class taxpayers were subsidizing the indulgences of the privileged…
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