Answer: everyone. “When the run of the mill stuff is done by AI, how do you think differently?” asks Rachel Basha, director at design company Basha Franklin. “How do you create spaces for people to stay curious, create new things and have ideas that AI never can? The workplace has to be a hub of that kind of culture in the future.”

The office of the future is different. Global architect firm Gensler’s 2025 workplace survey found only 14 per cent of people want a traditional style workplace. Jane Clay, principal and strategy director at Gensler, suggests it will be “a little bit coffee shop, a little bit innovation lab, a little bit library, a little bit collaboration hub to give choice, variety, and a break from the norm”. One of Gen Z’s biggest requests, she says, is for “the wisdom that comes with being around people who have lived a little in their teams – the energy that you get from being together in real life”.

The office of the future is healthy. Basha says the office should be “a dopamine space”, exciting the brain’s feel-good chemicals. Enjoying the workspace may even bring back in and out of work socialising which has fallen off since lockdown. After all, nearly half of Britons met their best friend at work. Let's get the good times back.

The office of the future is diverse. According to Deloitte, teams with neurodivergent professionals can be 30 per cent more productive than those without. Choosing to include high sensory areas, collaborative and quieter spaces, as well as controlling acoustics, lighting and colours in different zones is not just good management, it’s good business.

The office of the future is designed by employees. Chiat Day’s infamous 1994 experiment with hot desking failed until the employees broke it to suit themselves. Slack, the dreary pinging software tool of doom, has been adapted by ChatGPT staff to create a chamber music club among others. Basha found that the sick bay in one office was used by female employees as “a place to do their hair for events. So we added all the latest Dyson hair dryers and straighteners.”

The office of the future thinks about chairs. “Prolonged sitting at sub-optimal workstations is associated with musculoskeletal dysfunction and pain in the cervical, shoulder, and lumbar regions,” according to a team at the University of Auckland. Ergonomic chairs are great for all day deskees, Clark says, but there are chairs designed for the number of hours someone is expected to sit. “A company might have a staff of 600 but only 400 desks. The chairs will tell you intuitively which is a couple of hours desk and which is an all-day desk. Short stay chairs encourage meetings, site visits and nomadic employees.”

The office of the future needs to sort out its software. “Companies can have various teams across not just Slack but also Canva, Sharepoint and Trello, any number of these apps,” explains workplace culture consultant Richard Benson. “Different sub-groups bunker up in them. The net effect of workflow management apps has been to shift time, money and power from creatives to administrators and that has a detrimental effect on business.” His solution? People. “The PA and the editorial or creative desk assistant actually reduce interruptions for creativity instead of adding constant pings and Slack channel fomo.”

The office of the future needs more people, not less. “During the industrial revolution, mill owner Robert Owen said that industrialisation has created a new kind of man, and we have to work out how the world needs to change to accommodate them,” Benson says. “We’ve had the likes of Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold and Raymond Williams thinking about this for centuries. Now we’re approaching the AI revolution based on Mark Zuckerberg soundbites. We need to completely rethink how we work in very thoughtful, imaginative ways that take on the whole of human life.”