AI and the Future of Work: The Risk and the Reward

AI is absorbing many of the tasks that once filled offices. At the same time, it is giving us the tools to measure human experience in the workplace in ways we never could before. That is the disruption nobody is talking about clearly enough—and the opportunity hidden inside within AI.

Every generation of workplace design has been a response to disruption. The open office of the 1960s put everyone in view and packed more people onto a floor plan. The activity-based office of the 2010s acknowledged that mobile technology had untethered people from their desks. Both were genuine responses to real change. Both optimized for how space was used, not necessarily for what it did for the people inside it.

Now comes the most significant disruption yet: artificial intelligence.

The tasks that historically filled offices—research, writing, analysis, scheduling, pattern recognition—are increasingly being absorbed by AI. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that by 2030, the equivalent of 375 million workers globally will need to shift occupational categories because of automation. In knowledge-intensive industries, the restructuring is already underway.

At the same time, the technology disrupting the traditional purpose of the office is also giving us unprecedented tools to understand how people actually experience it. Sensor networks, occupancy analytics, and environmental monitoring make it possible to see how people use and respond to space in real time, at scale.

The risk and the reward have arrived together.

What AI cannot do is walk into a room and shift its energy. It cannot build the trust that accumulates between people who have shared a culture and a place over time. It cannot produce the spontaneous collision of ideas—the creative friction between minds that genuinely know each other.

Those human dynamics are increasingly what give the office its value.

In the 2026 US Office markets, prime space is sitting empty. This trend includes vacancies, but equally important are leased and fully-furnished spaces with dimmed lights and empty hallways as employees sign in to Zoom calls from home. Several large Boston employers have recently announced Q3 ‘return to office’ policies mandating four- and five-day in-person requirements. Debate continues whether mandates and hard-line policies (the ‘stick’) or a softer approach comprised of flexibility and incentivizing in-person attendance (the ‘carrot’) will be more effective for long-term organizational health. 

Workplace leaders face a challenge to entice employees back into the office with efforts to ‘make the commute worth it’, and they have been hamstrung by a lack of data/ proven metrics to guide this decision-making. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Every workplace has different value drivers and needs that must drive decision making to ‘earn the commute’.

The office is not going away, but the reason people come has changed fundamentally. The design language that responds to this moment has to come from somewhere different—not from real estate metrics alone, but from the science of how people actually function in space.

Most offices have never been measured against a human standard because the industry never built one. The metrics we use—utilization rates, cost per square foot, headcount density—were designed to manage real estate. They are good at that. What they do not tell you is whether the people inside the building are thinking clearly, feeling connected, or doing work that genuinely benefits from being there.

The World Green Building Council puts the cognitive performance impact from poor indoor environmental quality—inadequate light, bad acoustics, substandard air—at up to 40%. Gallup’s global research puts employee disengagement at 87%. These are not problems real estate efficiency alone can solve.

Start with the person. How does this space influence your thought process and focus? How do you feel when you walk in? Do you want to be here, and what can you accomplish while you are here?

Buildings are not neutral. Every design decision about light, scale, and material sends a signal to our brains about who matters in this place.

Rethinking the Framework to Focus on Human Experience

The urgency is new. So is our ability to measure it. If the purpose of the workplace is changing, then the way we evaluate workplace performance has to change with it.

We need to shift the conversation about workplace design away from space planning conventions and toward standards that create environments where people can do the work AI cannot—and adapt to whatever comes next.

That means shifting the programming conversation from “How many conference rooms do you need?” to understanding the optimal acoustic conditions for the kind of thinking your people actually do. From “How do you collaborate?” to “How do you communicate, and what does your nervous system need in order to do it well?” We need to design spaces that help regulate the human system so people can show up at their best mentally, physically, and creatively.

At CBT, designing around human experience has always been the starting point, not the finish line. We believe an approach to successful planning focuses less on square footage requirements and headcounts and more on the activities and behaviors. We have been building a framework that makes that intention measurable—drawing on neuroscience, environmental psychology, and organizational science to create something that functions both as a design brief and as a performance tool. CBT's VisionLab, a signature design visioning workshop, leverages intensive collaboration across a cross-section of our client’s organization, enabling an orchestrated yet free-flowing discussion to define their new workplace program, preferred interior aesthetics, and unique space needs.

IIDA New England captured this meaningfully with CBT’s visioning process and design for Veson Nautical’s Seaport Office space: 

“When Veson Nautical asked CBT to design their new workplace and guide the selection of a new office location, the designers proposed that the work begin with CBT’s two-day VisionLab process. With the move from Veson’s former digs to the bold and industrial Innovation and Design Building in Boston’s Seaport, came the desire for a fresh interpretation of the maritime company’s branded work environment, revisiting and refining it for a more attuned aesthetic. Veson’s former workplace had showcased the company’s sea-going focus in a direct, literal way. The brand’s colors—blue and orange—were prominent. As CBT’s design process uncovered, the Veson team needed and wanted a visually and spatially calm environment to support focus-driven work and effective collaboration.

…“when our VisionLab participants had a negative response to images of interior environments with high contrast, we asked why—a lot. Each time we asked, we got closer to something important, a truth about what this team of people really needed. We ultimately uncovered that—from software engineers to the product developers to the marketing team—everyone needed an environment that supported strong focus. This was at the heart of their thumbs-down responses to heavy patterns and high contrast, which had been featured in their former office. We heard ‘no, that’s too busy, too distracting.’ Our big ‘aha moment’ was when we understood that the new design needed to calm down all environmental surfaces, colors, tones. That was going to be really important in supporting the Veson team to do their best work.”

Six dimensions, each grounded in evidence. Each one measurable once the building is occupied and people are living and working inside it.

Designing this way changes the conversations architects have with clients. Daylight becomes a performance standard argued for through evidence rather than preference. Recovery becomes part of the brief—spaces that make genuine rest physically available and culturally legitimate. Culture itself becomes a spatial quality. The way a space communicates openness or hierarchy, trust or surveillance, are design decisions.

The organizations that understand this use their environments as instruments of culture, not simply containers for it.

AI’s second role is quieter but just as significant: it is becoming the infrastructure for measuring human experience in real time. Smart building systems that respond to occupant conditions. Occupancy analytics that reveal where an organization’s social life actually happens. Environmental monitoring that feeds ongoing refinement. Evaluating the effectiveness of wellness initiatives is crucial for continued improvement. Data can inform most successful approaches for expanding utilization in the future.

When you can show—with actual data, not a coffee bar tour—that your environment improves how people think, how connected they feel, and how long they stay, that becomes a meaningful tool for supporting, retaining, and recruiting talent.

When we design this way, we create places people genuinely want to inhabit—not because they are told to, but because the environment offers something worth the commute. This is not a prediction about where workplace design is heading. It is how we practice now.

The workplace was never really about spatial metrics. It was always about supporting the people doing the work.