Office spaces are accommodating for AI experimentation, Gensler co-chair says

If AI isn’t coming for your job, it’s certainly coming for your office space. Diane Hoskins, global co-chair at Gensler, and John Santora, CEO of WeWork, explained during this year’s panel at Semafor World Economy how offices are changing, and what employees want from them.

US workplaces are still feeling the ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Hoskins. While many workers were happy with remote arrangements in 2020, others were dissatisfied. The sweet spot, she said Gensler found from many employers in the US, was three days a week in the office.

“The come back to the workplace was not necessarily a come back to utopia,” she said. “There’s been a real, honest dialog about what it takes to do great work and what are the environments that are needed.”

Employees needed more space for collaboration, as well as quiet spaces to focus. Essentially, workspaces need to be individualized. “It is incumbent upon us as leaders…to make it worthwhile for the people that come to work,” Santora added.

“Employers that are investing in a bit of remodel, if not a wholesale remodel, to really address more collective space, better focus spaces, and really recognizing that people need to also have places where they’re going to be able to interact with other staff members virtually as well,” Hoskins said. “People are looking for a new kind of workplace as they come back into the office.”

Santora joined WeWork in 2024, the year after its Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Since then, he pointed out that WeWork has seen in its spaces more large companies, as well as 220 AI companies. “When you walk around some of our buildings in San Francisco or in New York with the glass walls, they’re writing formulas on the glass, and you see them interacting even though they’re different companies,” he said. “That creative nature is an important part of what our environment provides.”

Every organizational leader should be talking about AI right now, Hoskins said, noting that its adoption is helping drive people back to the office for real-time collaboration. “They want to know what their colleague is finding or learning how to do. No one is an island in these organizations,” she said, adding that for the first time in roughly 20 years, Gensler is seeing a “significant increase” in learning happening when they’re in the office. “There’s no manual. This [AI] is all new. It’s being invented as we speak.

Santora cautioned that companies will look different in a year or two, so leaders will need to make tough decisions. “You need to plan for the disruption versus reacting to that disruption.”