As organisations redefine where and how work happens, New York continues to attract significant investment in new headquarters and flagship workplaces. This panel brings together leaders behind these investments to explore how the corporate office is evolving into a destination for talent, innovation and culture. From hospitality-inspired amenities and wellness to curated food and beverage, events and neighbourhood activation, the discussion examines why experience has become central to workplace strategy and what today's headquarters must deliver to create lasting business value.

AI is not simply changing individual tasks; it is beginning to reshape jobs, teams, management structures and the capabilities organisations need. But most businesses are still making workforce and workplace decisions using job titles, organisational models and space assumptions built for an earlier era.

Drawing on Ben Zweig’s recent book, Job Architecture: Building a Language for Workforce Intelligence, this fireside conversation explores how organisations can develop a clearer understanding of the work their people actually perform—and use that intelligence to prepare for an AI-enabled future. Ben Zweig and Peter Miscovich will examine how changing tasks and skills could influence workforce composition, organisational design and workplace demand, and what leaders should do now to align people, technology and real estate strategy.

Professional services firms are among the organisations most actively rethinking the role of the office. As hybrid work, AI and changing expectations reshape how expertise is developed and delivered, the workplace must do more than accommodate people — it must accelerate learning, strengthen culture, support high-value collaboration and elevate the client experience. This panel brings together leaders behind major New York office projects to explore how the next generation of professional services workplaces is being designed, and what these investments reveal about the future of knowledge work.

Coinbase has operated remote-first since 2020 while continuing to invest in physical hubs, workplace technology and purposeful in-person experiences. In this fireside chat, Jeremy Browder will explain how that operating model translates into real estate, workplace design and employee experience. The discussion explores how Coinbase identifies the moments when physical presence creates distinctive value, how hubs support culture and problem-solving without defaulting to continuous attendance, and what workplace becomes when it is designed as an ecosystem of intentional experiences rather than a fixed destination.

A pre-launch highlight of the 2026 Global Workplace Adaptivity Index, an upcoming Vecos report developed in partnership with WORKTECH Academy. Drawing on billions of workplace-use events and expert insight, this session examines how people are really using the office and what the evidence means for workplace demand, space planning and employee experience. It will explore how organisations can create more adaptive, people-centred environments while improving space efficiency and responding more confidently to changing patterns of work.

Corporate real estate has often struggled to translate workplace activity into the language of enterprise strategy. As AI improves the ability to connect workplace, workforce and portfolio data, CRE has an opportunity to move from reporting utilisation to influencing decisions about investment, organisational performance and change. This session explores how leaders can build a more compelling evidence base, ask better questions of their data and use AI to strengthen CRE’s voice at the executive table.

Employees experience the workplace through a series of small moments: entering the building, finding colleagues, starting a meeting, locating support and moving between spaces. When those moments fail, frustration quickly undermines trust in the wider workplace proposition. This rapid provocation explores what recurring sources of friction reveal about human needs, and how integrated technology, automation and service design can remove barriers without losing the human experience.

Every organisation in the room has a workplace strategy. Most also have an AI strategy. But when the next disruption hits, how many can honestly say they know how their space is being used right now - not estimated or inferred from badge swipes, but actually known? In this session, Occuspace CEO Nic Halverson makes the case that the gap between being data-informed and genuinely data-ready is wider than many leaders want to admit, and that closing it is a strategic move hiding in plain sight.

For years, we've been obsessed with measuring occupancy. We built better dashboards. Better utilization reports. Better portfolio insights. That's been valuable. But it's also created a category that's become very good at explaining yesterday. The next frontier isn't prettier analytics or more integrations. It's using occupancy as a live operational signal that allows buildings to respond in real time. From workplace apps and employee experiences through to HVAC, lighting and building automation, the organizations seeing the biggest returns won't be the ones collating the most data. They'll be the ones putting it to work.

This session will explore how workplace technology has evolved between 2021 and 2026 as hybrid working shifted from a temporary response to a permanent operating model. We discuss how focus has moved from location-centric workplaces to experience-centric environments designed around employee needs. Through a global consultancy case study, we highlight how reducing workplace friction improves collaboration, productivity, and employee experience. The presentation submits that successful organizations use integrated, data-driven workplace technologies not simply to digitize processes, but to create adaptive, people-centered workplaces that support how people work today and in the future.

For decades, the industry has measured what's easy to count, energy, occupancy, certifications, and ignored the four variables that determine whether the people inside a building can actually think, focus, sleep, or recover: air quality, thermal comfort, lighting, and acoustics. Drawing on continuous environmental data from over 1 billion square feet of premium buildings operated by the world's largest REITs and Fortune 100 corporate occupiers, Liam Bates, CEO of Kaiterra, makes the contrarian case that building performance has been measured backwards, shows why the perceived tension between environmental quality and energy performance dissolves once you measure both, and reveals what separates buildings that earn the rent from those that don't.

As artificial intelligence reshapes the nature of work, LinkedIn’s Workplace team is advancing its flexible workplace strategy by reimagining how physical space supports emerging forms of collaboration. This session will present insights from recent research, including 40 leadership interviews, and findings from an 11-week experiment designed to test dedicated, AI-embedded environments for small, autonomous, cross-functional teams ("pods"). The “Pod Work Area” pilot at LinkedIn’s headquarters assigned two pods (9 and 13 members) to dedicated zones with sit-stand desks, collaborative spaces, and Agile Project Rooms equipped with agentic technology. Using surveys, interviews, observations, and simulations, the pilot explored how proximity, space design, and embedded AI help close the gap between decision-making and execution while fostering performance and psychological safety.

For several years, companies have poured AI into individual productivity. Drafts write themselves; code reviews take minutes. Yet teams don’t feel faster, because AI didn’t remove the bottleneck, it moved it, from execution to the judgment, alignment, and decisions that happen between people. Most offices were built for the old constraint: focus at a desk, or meet in a room. Drawing on Atlassian’s research across 12,000 knowledge workers and 172 Fortune 1000 executives, this talk introduces a blueprint for the AI-enabled office, Ideate, Calibrate, Regulate, and shows what workplace and real estate leaders can pilot now to make coordination nearly effortless.

A concise synthesis of the day and the decisions workplace leaders should take forward.