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.

As the proliferation of AI agents changes how people work and alters team dynamics and work processes, workplace strategy must respond with more accommodating workspaces. This session will explore emerging research into AI-native work, drawing from both industry-wide trends and internal research on AI-native teams. It will consider the implications for collaboration, workplace experience, space planning, and the future role of the office.

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, Stephanie 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 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 intelligence has spent a decade describing what happened. The next shift is towards systems that recommend—and increasingly initiate—action. Could AI release unused rooms, adapt meeting environments, redirect workplace services or model portfolio change before leaders ask? Moving from the individual workday to building operations and enterprise real estate, this panel tests how close we are to a self-optimising workplace. Speakers will examine which decisions can be delegated, where human judgement must remain, how systems and data must connect, and what evidence would prove that workplace intelligence is improving experience and performance rather than adding complexity.

The workplace function is evolving beyond managing space and operations to becoming a strategic driver of business performance. This session highlights how leading organizations are integrating data, business strategy, workplace insights and financial performance to help executives make better decisions and drive enterprise-wide outcomes.

This panel will explore how the physical workplace must evolve as AI reshapes the pace, patterns and purpose of work. As human–AI teams take on more complex tasks, what environments best support deep focus, rapid learning, critical thinking and cross-disciplinary innovation? The discussion will examine how workplace experience, adaptable design and real-time insight can turn space into an active performance platform—strengthening connection and wellbeing, enabling teams to move faster, and ensuring the workplace evolves alongside technology rather than being overtaken by it.

Rather than trying to predict a single future of work, leading organisations are designing workplaces that can evolve with them. As teams grow and reorganise, work patterns shift and expectations change, how can workplace leaders create environments that remain relevant over time? Drawing on recent global workplace projects, this panel explores how design, space planning, data, and employee feedback can create a continuous cycle of learning and adaptation — balancing global principles with local culture, efficiency with experience, and immediate needs with long-term flexibility.

Jeremy Browder, Senior Director of Real Estate & Employee Experience at Coinbase, will share how this operating model translates into practice across real estate, workplace design, and employee experience. Within this model, presence is intentional rather than assumed, with physical space designed around specific moments of value rather than continuous occupancy. The discussion explores how in-person time is made more intentional and how hubs support culture, collaboration, and performance without defaulting to traditional office attendance, asking what the employee experience stack looks like when workplace functions as a connected ecosystem of intentional moments rather than a fixed destination.

As AI becomes deeply embedded in the workplace, organizations face a new challenge: how to increase productivity without weakening human cognition? In this session, computational neuroscientist and Future of Work strategist Natalia Bielczyk introduces the concept of the Brain Economy and explores the hidden risks of cognitive debt—the gradual erosion of critical thinking, creativity, focus, and decision-making caused by overreliance on AI. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, elite performance training, and organizational research, attendees will learn practical strategies for building AI-enabled workplaces that strengthen human intelligence, preserve innovation, and create sustainable high performance in the age of AI.

In today’s accelerated workplace, organisations are rethinking how physical environments can keep pace with rapid change, evolving ways of working, and rising expectations of performance. This panel explores how inclusion is becoming a central driver of workplace design—shaping how spaces support people with diverse cognitive, sensory, and physical needs. Bringing together perspectives on inclusive design, accessibility, and the role of art and experience in the workplace, the discussion highlights how environments can be more intuitive and supportive for everyone. From fractal and nature inspired approaches that support cognitive ease to practical innovations in accessibility and experience design, the conversation moves from intent to lived experience. As workplace systems become more complex and data-informed, panellists will focus on the human outcome: how inclusive design improves clarity, reduces friction, and enhances overall wellbeing and performance.

Distributed work is permanent, but conventional video often loses the nonverbal communication, spatial awareness and sense of being together that support meaningful collaboration. Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson and Noro CEO Tommaso Trionfi bring together decades of research on virtual human interaction and practical experience connecting physical workplaces. This session explores what creates presence, when immersive technology improves collaboration, and how workplace leaders can design environments that make distance less consequential—without attempting to replace the moments when people should genuinely travel and meet in person.