As major organizations invest in new headquarters and landmark workplace projects across New York, the corporate HQ is being redefined. No longer simply a concentration of desks, it is expected to express brand, strengthen culture, attract talent, enable collaboration and prove the value of physical presence in a hybrid, AI-enabled era. This panel brings together workplace leaders to explore what the future HQ must now deliver — for people, business performance and the city around it.

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.

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.

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. 

AI can now generate stacking plans, test fits, and portfolio scenarios in minutes — so why do so many workplace AI deployments underdeliver? Drawing on new research from Harvard and BCG, CSIRO, and a real CEO-approved headquarters restacks, this session takes an honest look at where AI genuinely delivers, where it convincingly fails, and why the winning model pairs AI-powered speed with human judgment: buying outcomes, not tools.

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.

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.

The £10m toilet roll; the cost of a poor bathroom experience, how much it really matters and how much it actually costs you.

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.

As workplace technology becomes more intelligent, can AI make meaningful decisions about the physical workplace if it doesn’t understand the space itself? Through a real-world case study, MapsPeople explores how spatial intelligence can create a shared digital understanding of the workplace across booking, utilization, employee experience and operations. The case study explores what this approach enabled in practice, and how spatial intelligence could shape the next generation of intelligent workplace systems.

This session explores the shift in employee expectations for a frictionless workplace and what it means for how organisations design and deliver workplace experience. Sharing insights into why a company can invest heavily in space, technology, and employee experience, but fail to reduce friction. The operational relationships, decision pathways, and organizational dynamics are often invisible, but they determine success. When those invisible systems are not aligned, friction happens. Attendees will learn how to leverage workplace insights from facility management to drive better business outcomes, create more effective employee experiences, and align strategic goals with operational execution.

The common assumption is that AI will pull us apart: fewer meetings, fewer watercooler moments, more time alone with our agents. But what if the opposite is true? Drawing on MIT research into what makes human conversation genuinely productive, this fireside chat explores how AI, used well, can create time, headspace, and tooling for deeper collaboration, not less of it. Expect a thoughtful look at why the most AI integrated teams may end up the most connected, and what that means for how we design proximate work going forward.

As AI reshapes how teams collaborate, organizations must rethink how the workplace evolves to support new ways of working. This session follows LinkedIn’s journey from research and hypothesis development to workplace experimentation, large-scale implementation, and post-occupancy evaluation. Using the newly opened 1030 Maude building in California as a live case study, Aurelio will share how workplace research informed the design of new environments for small and agile teams, how findings from an 11-week pilot influenced key design decisions, and how ongoing measurement are determining whether those ideas deliver value at scale or require adjustment for future workplaces.

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.