‘In the age of AI, offices will need to be magnets for employees’

As AI automates routine business tasks and flattens corporate hierarchies, the office of the future will need to work harder both to get staff to come in and, when they do, to facilitate uniquely human activities like creativity, judgement and relationship-building.

That was the message delivered by 40-year-plus veteran of the commercial office sector, Despina Katsikakis, at this year’s CIOB Sir James Wates Lecture, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons on 24 September in association with Autodesk. Her lecture was titled “AI and the reorganisation of work and place”.

Executive partner and global chair of strategic consulting at commercial real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, Katsikakis drew on her firm’s latest biennial survey, What Occupiers Want 2025. This surveyed 235 global commercial real estate leaders representing companies with 8.1 million employees and 340 million sq ft of office floor area.

“Technologies come along, whether it’s steam, electricity, computing, or the cloud, that completely transform business, the economy and society,” Katsikakis said.

“And downstream, each of these technologies has a profound impact on the built environment. AI is set to have probably the most dramatic impact of all. It is the fastest-diffusing technology in history. And it’s actually hitting a concentrated economy and creating massive geopolitical changes.

“We’re hearing about it every day of the week. So we have to shift our thinking from AI being a tool to AI being a significant economic force that will change everything we do.”

Fundamentally, she said, AI “collapses the cost of thinking”, or knowledge work. She ventured that 40% of most of our work tends to be routine, functional, measurable tasks that AI can do. And since office buildings were conceived to house individual knowledge workers, they need to be rethought to cater for humans and the things they do that AI can’t, which are increasing in value.

“We’re seeing it in my own sector, commercial real estate advisory,” she continued. “Broker relationships are now AI-matched predictive underwriting. Portfolio workplace strategy used to be periodic, and it’s now iterative, sensor-driven optimisation – it happens all at once. One of the biggest areas is valuation. Appraiser judgement has moved to real-time, AI-driven performance modelling.

“And the construction industry, of course, has been using generative design for some time, and AI is accelerating that. Certainly, site delivery is shifting from labour-intensive methods to AI-guided robotics and predictive scheduling. And digital twins are definitely moving to an AI-powered model. Every single industry is being disrupted in a different way.

“As work changes and roles and skills evolve, when and where people will do that work will change, and the workplace needs to change accordingly. Buildings will move from being static, process-oriented containers to more dynamic and responsive environments,” she said.

AI has brought the value of a corporation’s human talent into sharper relief, Katsikakis said, and the research identified some interesting trends attesting to that.

In the latest What Occupiers Want survey, among Cushman & Wakefield’s global clients, 30% of heads of corporate real estate have stopped reporting to the chief financial officer, who sees real estate as a cost to be reduced, and now report to the chief human resources officer, who is tasked with where and how to find the right talent to make sure the company is competitive.

She gave the example of an insurance firm in the City of London which had 100,000 sq ft of real estate costing £5m a year. The firm’s people cost the firm £35m a year. The firm calculated that the value of its people working one productive hour was £2.5m, meaning that just two productive hours had a value equal to the firm’s total annual real estate costs.

“What if real estate can actually drive different behaviours and outcomes?” she said. “It becomes a real enabler for the business.”

This will be tricky in the wake of covid, which resulted in mass evacuations from offices around the country. In Katsikakis’ view, corporations will need to think beyond just mandating people’s return.

Such mandates have risen by around 12% since 2024, but actual attendance has only increased 1-3%, she pointed out.

The main way offices can help in the age of AI is by helping staff feel good. People with a high sense of wellbeing say they’re three times more able to do their best work, she said, which makes wellbeing a bigger contributor to productivity than AI.

But Cushman & Wakefield found that only 42% of employees report having a sense of wellbeing, and that drops to 23% among those with no flexibility in their work schedule, and to 19% among those with no choice over where they work.

On the other hand, Katsikakis said, companies that offer flexibility of location and schedule have, on average, grown their revenues 1.7 times faster than those that don’t.

She insisted, however, that it’s not the case that people just don’t want to go to the office.

“It’s actually quite the opposite,” she said. “The majority of people want to go to the office to be with people, to make connections, to build relationships, to foster collaboration, for work-life balance – to have a bit of a break, not be in their house, working all day – and, very, very significantly, to connect to culture and the purpose of the business.

“Now, what’s interesting is that only a third of them say the office delivers that, so we’re not designing offices, even today, that deliver the purpose of the office. How are we going to do that with AI?”

She said most employees calculate the return on investment of the time and cost of going to the office. If that return is good, if the office is intriguing enough for them to want to come in and inspiring enough when they’re there to want to come back, then the office has value.

So, companies need to think about offices from a “hospitality mindset”, she said. Offices should offer “curated events, activities and experiences for employees and customers”. She quoted Meta’s vice-president of global real estate, Rob Cookson, as saying the office should be a “magnet” rather than a place people feel they have to go to.

“What’s really interesting here is that the majority of organisations don’t actually address why people should come back to the office,” Katsikakis said.

“They’re simply looking at utilisation of space rather than purpose. All businesses, construction included, are customer focused. But very rarely do we turn that lens inward to think about the employee as the customer. In today’s world of talent, and in the future world of AI talent, the employee is the customer – and what their experience is becomes critical to the business.”