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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.