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 few through business meal deductions.
Then, hustle culture, seeded by Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” early 2000s tech boom, reinforced by shows such as The Apprentice, and even, ironically, books including The 4-Hour Workweek, turned us on to the idea of being digital nomads. Inhaling a plain turkey sandwich at my desk – quickly and alone – seemed a small concession to keep up with it all and move up the corporate ladder.
The 2010s ushered in social media and gig economy rhetoric – see “rise and grind” and #nodaysoff – that made constant productivity feel like a moral virtue rather than just a job expectation. Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta, encouraged women to assert themselves at work in her book, Lean In. Slack launched to the public in 2014 and had more than 1 million daily users by 2015. By 2016, the average American professional was checking work email before getting out of bed. (I’m still in that unfortunate habit.)
This is how we completely lost our lust for luxurious midday dining. But the historical criticism sharply misses the point if you apply the logic today. These indulgent detentes shouldn’t be seen as excess at all, rather as meeting forums where people actually take the time to meet – at a time when we’ve otherwise forgotten how to. I long for more occasions to linger over a dozen oysters and casually sip a Sancerre at the Polo Lounge.
We have to try something else, as even the return to office (RTO) mandates have failed to ignite the authentic connections we’re missing. The idea of getting people back in cubicles was masked as a push for being more social, yes, but really it was all for the sake of increased bottom-line productivity, which leads to revenue, which leads to profit.
Recent research from Boston University proves the workforce saw through those motives, citing that sitting together in cubicles is not the cure-all we wanted. More than a quarter of workers say RTO mandates have actually deepened the divide between colleagues, according to Bamboo HR, because managers are tracking attendance instead of presence.
We’ve lost a bit of humanity as tools reign supreme, and we’ve forgotten what authentic connection actually entails. As a manager, it’s harder to get to know the employees who work on my team. The emails, consistently generated by large language models, are all starting to sound the same. I don’t experience many “drive-bys” where someone will come ask the boss a question.
I find myself wanting more of the personal anecdotes – like hearing about someone’s weekend while they un-jammed the fax machine for me. There is sparse watercooler chat these days.
Some things require presence, unhurried time and the willingness to prioritize connection for its own sake, rather than as a means to close a deal. Whether with alcohol or not, the three-martini lunch could be the foundation from which a new age of real work eventually flows.
Connection can’t be tracked, though it can be felt. Preferably while marveling with peers over a tableside caesar salad.
