Work has changed dramatically in the past decade—but leadership systems largely have not. In this talk, Drew Jones explores why many organisations remain stuck in personality-driven and proximity-based models of management that rely on visibility, office presence, and informal power. These systems struggle to scale and break down in distributed and AI-enabled environments. Jones introduces an alternative: system-driven organisations built on a clear Digital Culture Playbook—defining decision frameworks, accountability systems, results-based performance, and coaching-oriented leadership. With work coordinated digitally, the office can evolve into something new: the Community Office, a place designed not for routine tasks, but for connection, learning/mentoring, collaboration, and shared culture.

Most leaders assume speed is the answer. However, organisations achieving sustained output prioritise coherence before they scale. Today, this distinction is urgent: AI amplifies whatever signal it receives. In coherent organisations, AI compounds advantage; in incoherent ones, it scales confusion. Using the Execution Coherence Index, Rob reveals the structural patterns that dictate whether AI investments return value or amplify dysfunction. Delegates will leave with a diagnostic lens to assess their own coherence, structural design principles for the post-acceleration workplace, and a direct challenge to the assumption that speed is strategy.

Everyone is talking about ‘generative’ and now ‘agentic’ AI, but what comes next? ‘Physical’ AI is on the horizon and rapidly coming into view. This session will explore how workplaces must change to accommodate a hybrid human-robot workforce, and which types of adjustments will be worth the squeeze on wallets. Think floor spaces, IT systems and job schemas, but with a futuristic twist.

As AI reshapes knowledge work and organisations rethink the role of the office, workplace experience has become a critical driver of organisational performance. The most successful companies are no longer designing workplaces simply to accommodate people, they are creating environments that strengthen culture, attract talent, enable collaboration and deliver measurable business value. In this fireside conversation, we explore how workplace experience is evolving from an operational function into a strategic business capability. Drawing on research and real-world case studies, the discussion will examine how leading organisations are integrating technology, hospitality and intelligent services to create workplaces that people actively choose to use, and that support productivity, wellbeing and organisational resilience.

For a decade the workplace category has been obsessed with measurement; better dashboards, better utilisation reports, better portfolio insights. It's been valuable, but it has produced an industry that is good at explaining yesterday. If your workplace technology platform disappeared tomorrow, what would actually stop working? For most organisations: not much. You'd lose reports but would the experience of the building remain the same?
The value now sits in two layers beyond the dashboard. First, the workplace layer - desk and room booking, wayfinding, signage, cleaning, IWMS and workplace apps - where live occupancy makes the employee experience work rather than just describing it. Then the building layer, where occupancy replaces schedules to drive HVAC, lighting and automation. Both depend on the same two things: an integration surface that lets data leave the analytics platform, and a signal accurate enough to act on.

The office is a failing brand. Its customers have stopped showing up, its proposition is unclear, and its owners are resorting to mandates, which is what brands do right before they die. In this live, interactive closing session, Alice Phillips and Dan Emery of Work is Weird Now put the office through a real brand sprint, with the audience as the client. Shape the brief, vote on the territories and watch an AI strategist stress-test the room's thinking, live. You'll leave with a new answer to the only question that matters: what is the office actually for?