The AI-enabled office needs more than desks and meeting rooms

Creegan said that change has implications for the physical workplace, too.

“Most offices are designed around a traditional model of knowledge work, focused work at the desk, then moving to the office to connect with people,” Creegan said. “So that made total sense for the way we did work a few years ago. But AI is speeding up execution… the bottleneck has shifted. The work has moved to where people are aligning, where they’re applying a lot of judgment, where ideation is happening. That old model of desk and meeting room isn’t helping to unblock that bottleneck, and in some ways it’s hindering it.”

Gensler’s 2026 Global Workplace Survey, polling more than 16,400 office workers across 16 countries, found something similar. Employees who use AI most heavily report spending less time working alone and more time learning and connecting with colleagues, a sign the office’s role is evolving rather than shrinking.

Three spaces built for the AI era

To address the fragmentation tax, Creegan and her team identified three types of spaces to experiment with, each built for a different type of AI-augmented work.

The first, ideation, calls for low-friction, informal spaces, which might include things like writable walls and casual seating instead of a conference table, giving people room to work through an idea before it’s fully formed.