In July 2026, Cisco gave approximately 90,000 employees access to a personalized AI assistant designed to answer questions, handle tasks and route requests to the most appropriate AI model.
This is just one example of where the future of work is heading. Agentic AI is changing how people get information, make decisions, engage with colleagues and accomplish tasks. The implications for CRE go beyond how much space businesses need.
The traditional office was built for a different model of work. It brought people together because being together made it easier to access expertise, learn from colleagues, build relationships and get work done. Much of that value was implicit. We did not always have to name the business outcome the office was enabling because the office was simply part of how work happened.
That world has changed.
AI is taking on more tasks that once required people to rely on one another for information, coordination and routine expertise. That gives us an opportunity to be much more deliberate about the work that still benefits from being together.
In this new world of work, physical spaces are one of the many tools available to a business to deliver outcomes. If employees gain capabilities that previously required access to several other people, what should they accomplish when you bring them together?
CRE should be able to name the business outcome a workplace is intended to improve, show where being together makes a difference and help the business make the right investment in space.
I believe the age of AI gives CRE an extraordinary opportunity to do exactly that.
The office came with a lot bundled in
The office gave new employees somewhere to watch experienced colleagues handle difficult customers. It put expertise within walking distance. Managers could notice someone struggling, and relationships developed without anyone scheduling time to build them.
That model worked because the office was doing real business work, even when we did not always name it. It accelerated learning, put expertise within reach, created relationships and gave teams a place to solve problems together.
AI makes us reopen that calculation. As AI agents take on some of those functions, we can make the office more purposeful. We can concentrate physical space around the activities where being together, building community, culture and belonging contribute the most. That is a much more interesting design brief.
Look closely at what the companies are changing:
Microsoft’s Sales Development agent can engage leads, answer questions, qualify prospects and hand opportunities to sellers with relevant context. Citi’s next phase of AI deployment moves beyond assistance toward agents taking on defined pieces of everyday work. The people function is changing, too. Atlassian has a Chief People and AI Enablement Officer. Moderna expanded its people leader’s responsibilities to include digital technology, explicitly connecting the decision to how AI would redesign work.
There is a vital lesson here for CRE: The people function is expanding its remit around how AI changes work. I believe CRE should do the same: own the workplace side of AI transformation, working with HR, IT and business leaders to decide where the office creates value, and what employees need from space, services, and technology as their responsibilities change. And use AI to continuously evolve what outcomes the office enables.
Your headcount can stay the same while the work changes dramatically
IKEA offers a useful example. As its AI customer-service bot, Billie, took on routine inquiries, IKEA retrained roughly 8,500 call-center employees for interior-design advisory work. The headcount spreadsheet alone would miss the significance of that shift. Answering routine questions and helping customers redesign rooms require different capabilities.
In a nutshell, this is the future of work: rapid reskilling, AI-powered augmentation, reinvention, and new business growth. What makes it interesting for CRE is the question: do customer service agents and interior-design advisors require the same type of footprint? What changes in the space to enable what they do? We may see work move between onshore and offshore models, and between on-site, hybrid, and remote settings.
What does this mean for the physical footprint? The point is to make sure the workplace supports the work people in it are now being asked to do.
Spaces (and by extension the enabling services and technologies) should adapt to new ways of working, not the other way around.
The same number of employees can represent a fundamentally different demand for physical space.
What is your proximity premium?
Here is the question I would put at the center of the investment discussion: What becomes sufficiently better when these people are physically together?
I think of that additional value as the proximity premium.
For a product team, it might mean resolving a difficult design decision in one working session rather than circulating comments for weeks. For a new account manager, it might mean developing judgment faster by observing an experienced colleague handle a negotiation. Those are propositions a business can test.
CRE is sitting on a goldmine of data about how people work and what people do in workspaces. How are we using it?
Consider this: Google bought Spirit Airlines’ internal corporate data for $10 million during a bankruptcy auction, including employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, calendars and operational records. What we may have historically thought of as digital exhaust may be more valuable than we imagine.
We have gotten very good at measuring whether people are in the office. We need to become equally ambitious about understanding what value is created because they are there.
The answers could justify substantial investment or show us where the office needs to be redesigned, reconfigured, or supplemented with other forms of workplace support. I would welcome either finding because the goal is workspaces that earn their place in the operating model.
Work and workplace are moving at different time scales
JLL’s 2026 Future of Work Survey captures the challenge: 78% see AI changing their real estate strategy. Only 31% are actively preparing to redesign space for human-AI collaboration. The gap between recognition and execution is where CRE has an opportunity to lead.
Imagine signing a ten-year lease around today’s workflows. Two years later, the company has fundamentally changed how it serves customers. The investment still has eight years to run. The assumptions embedded in that lease can change long before the lease expires. This means CRE needs to keep testing business assumptions. To be clear, understanding the business has always been part of CRE’s job.
What changes now is how confidently we can translate growth into headcount, headcount into space, and today’s requirements into a long-term commitment.
We need business cases that make those assumptions explicit and tell us when to revisit them.
CRE can bring the next version of the business to life
Put yourself in the shoes of a business leader trying to approve a workplace investment in today’s environment where AI is changing your operating model. You see opportunities to grow but cannot yet know how many employees or locations that growth will require. What do you do with underutilized space? How do you build culture in a hybrid setting? How much do you invest, where and when?
For AI CRE leaders, the opportunity is to move the conversation beyond the unresolved debate about the office and toward decisions the business can test:
- Take ownership of the workplace implications. Work with HR, IT and business leaders to identify where AI is changing important workflows, using AI to help map the tasks, interactions, and workplace support those workflows require. Test where proximity improves outcomes, then translate the findings into changes to space, services, and technology.
- Make the trade-offs decision-ready. Use AI to help build growth, hiring and productivity scenarios, then test them through validated financial and capacity models. Show leadership what the existing portfolio can support, where flexibility is worth buying and what would justify the next commitment.
- Give the business confidence to move. Use AI to help maintain a living workplace brief, tracking outcomes and flagging changes against agreed assumptions for CRE and business owners to review. Give executives clear answers: what is working, how far can we scale, and when must we decide?
CRE does not need to own every part of AI transformation to lead its part. By connecting changes in work to decisions about the workplace, CRE leaders can give the business a dependable base today and room to become something different tomorrow.
The answer to “What business outcomes does the office enable?” should become specific. For example, this workplace helps new colleagues develop judgment faster, helps teams resolve difficult product decisions, or helps accelerate trust-building with clients. Those are outcomes businesses find worth investing in when the evidence supports them.
That is the opportunity for CRE. The business does not need to become an expert in real estate. CRE already is. Its job is to understand the work, understand what physical space can do, and show the business where the two come together.
AI is changing the work. CRE has an opportunity to make the workplace an active part of what comes next.
