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.

What happens after someone enters the workplace? In this fireside chat, we explore how identity and access can connect with the wider workplace experience. From navigating spaces to accessing services and amenities, we examine how connected technology can reduce friction and create a simpler, more responsive workplace. Workplace experience increasingly depends on connecting identity, access, location and building systems into a seamless journey. This session explores how smart-space infrastructure can reduce friction, strengthen security and help environments respond more effectively to users, while balancing personalisation, privacy, operational efficiency and a consistently human experience.

People change every day. Does your workplace? Drawing on billions of human workplace interactions from data of over 1.4 million online lockers, Vecos and Worktech Academy identify the capabilities that distinguish adaptive workplaces from the rest, and what the impact is on the workplace, employees and business.

What will define the world's best workplaces over the next decade? As AI reshapes knowledge work, organisations rethink the role of the office, and cities evolve around new patterns of living and working, the next generation of workplace is being designed today. Bringing together leading architects, designers, developers and workplace strategists, this exclusive keynote panel explores the ideas that are redefining the future of the office. Rather than focusing on a single project, the discussion examines the broader forces transforming workplace design: the convergence of AI and the built environment, the growing importance of wellbeing and human experience, the drive towards net zero and circularity, and the challenge of creating workplaces that foster innovation, attract talent and strengthen organisational culture. Drawing on global projects and practical experience, the panel will debate what organisations should be building today to remain competitive tomorrow—and which lessons from the world's most progressive developments can be applied at every scale.
Discussion topics include:

How AI will change the design, operation and purpose of the workplace

Creating destinations that people actively choose to work in

Designing for wellbeing, collaboration and high performance

Balancing sustainability, flexibility and commercial value

The role of mixed-use districts and urban regeneration in shaping the future workplace

What every organisation should be planning for over the next decade

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.

Disconnected tools and fragmented workflows are quietly taxing productivity across every organisation. This panel explores how ambient AI, adaptive spaces, and industry-wide collaboration can strip away that friction, without sacrificing the security and trust employees need to embrace it.

As organisations seek to reduce embodied carbon, circular procurement is moving from ambition to execution. But what does it take to deliver reuse at commercial scale without compromising quality, budget or programme? Drawing on JLL’s 90,000 sq ft flagship UK office at 1 Broadgate, this session will share lessons from the project’s furniture strategy, a deliberate test of what the reuse market can achieve. The project delivered over 70% reuse furniture across a premium workplace, with no cost premium over buying new. The conversation will explore what it takes to achieve these results: balancing the uncertainties of the reuse market with the need for proper functionality and specifications, using a procurement model that puts reuse, trusted supplier relationships, and careful asset management at the forefront. Panellists will also examine how digital product intelligence and rigorous data verification can support credible sustainability claims, embodied-carbon measurement and audit-ready reporting. Experts on the panel will offer insights from their own circular workplace delivery experiences and will consider how the market must evolve for circular procurement to become standard practice. Attendees will leave with a practical roadmap: how to build the business case for circular procurement, what organisations need to change internally to make reuse workable, and the key lessons that can accelerate adoption across the industry.

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?