On a Tuesday morning, a support agent in Dublin closes a tricky ticket while an engineer in Bengaluru ships a fix, and a sales manager in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, joins a customer call spanning four time zones. None of them set foot in the same building, yet the work clicks.

New findings in the GoTo and Workplace Intelligence Pulse of Work 2025 show 51% of employees expect AI to make offices obsolete, and 62% prefer AI-enhanced remote work, based on a 2,500-person sample from 10 countries taken February through April 2025.

A companion Workplace Intelligence summary underscores broad support for continued AI investment among employees and IT leaders. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index adds that most leaders see AI as essential for competitiveness, even as many admit they lack a clear plan.

The office no longer holds a monopoly on coordination. Weekly swipe data in the Back to Work Barometer show national office occupancy hovering in the mid-50s, with Tuesday peaks and Friday troughs that reflect team scheduling instead of uniform onsite weeks. This isn’t a blip tied to any single city, but rather an operating pattern.

Independent economists reach similar conclusions. A new Becker Friedman Institute working paper finds that work from home accounted for about a quarter of paid days in the United States in 2025, once surveys are harmonized. The share varies by role and region, yet the trend line stays greatly above pre-2020 norms.

AI accelerates this shift by compressing the distance between people, systems, and knowledge. In the GoTo survey, majorities say AI improves flexibility, preserves productivity anywhere, and enables better remote customer support. Moreover, 95% of employees and 92% of IT leaders endorse current or increased AI investment.

Treat location as a variable that AI can optimize, not a constraint to restore through blanket mandates.

Inside core productivity suites, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reports widespread use of generative tools and clear executive belief that adoption is now table stakes. Treat location as a variable that AI can optimize, not a constraint to restore through blanket mandates.

Customers value speed, clarity, and empathy, not a street address. Gartner’s agentic AI forecast notes that by 2029 autonomous agents will resolve 80% of common service issues and reduce operating costs by 30%. Digitally routed work aligns with distributed teams that already prioritize queue design, knowledge bases, and real-time analytics.

Service leaders are already retooling. The latest CX Trends 2025 shows most CX organizations leaning into AI at scale, with leaders expecting competitive pressure to reward firms that deploy intelligent triage and self-service. When the workflow begins digitally, your team can sit anywhere without sacrificing response times or quality.

Worker sentiment echoes these operational signals. The Work Trend Index finds strong uptake of AI among knowledge workers alongside a leadership gap on enablement, which creates urgency for training and guardrails. Retention risk also enters the equation.

A 2025 Pew Research analysis reports that 46% of remote-capable employees would be unlikely to stay if forced back to full time. AI-enabled hybrid policies protect both service performance and talent continuity.

Workers are telling leaders to fund capabilities, not couches.

Budgets telegraph priorities. In the GoTo survey, 61% of employees say companies should prioritize AI as much as or more than office amenities, and the same share say AI investment would boost their productivity and engagement more than perks. Workers are telling leaders to fund capabilities, not couches.

Public data confirm that flexible arrangements remain embedded. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ telework trends show substantial at-home work throughout occupations in 2024, and a related BLS brief reports that 24.9% of employed adults 25 and older teleworked during the first quarter of 2024, reinforcing hybrid as a mainstream choice. Longer-run tracking from WFH Research, summarized in the St. Louis Fed’s WFH series, reaches a similar conclusion.

IT strategy multiplies the benefits. Platform capabilities like co-pilots, virtual agents, and automated runbooks now ship in mainstream tools. As these tools mature, they lift the floor on service quality and reduce the overhead of distance.

The value at stake is significant. McKinsey estimates multitrillion-dollar impact from generative AI in its analysis of generative AI value, with large gains in customer service, sales, and software. Those benefits arrive faster when leaders pair AI deployment with explicit hybrid design, clear measurement, and focused in-person time for training and trust-building.

Flexible work is no longer a stopgap. AI now coordinates tasks, reveals knowledge, routes service, and personalizes engagement without caring which badge reader you pass in the morning. Offices still matter for targeted gatherings, but they no longer define where value gets created. The strongest evidence tells leaders to invest where the work actually happens, which is increasingly inside software that travels with every employee.

Fund the AI stack, tune the workflows, measure the outcomes, and let place follow purpose.