The last year marked a major shift in the mission of returning to the office. For the first time since the outbreak, more than Half of Fortune 100 companies Move from a hybrid setup to a fully office policy. but Mark DixonInternational Workplace Group (IWG) CEO and founder addresses JPMorgan boss Jamie DimonAmazon’s Andy Jassy, and any CEO asking to return to the office: You’re not serious about AI.
Dixon operates the world’s largest flexible working provider, with more than 8 million users in 122 countries and 85% of the Fortune 500 as customers. From his perspective, Dickson believes bosses who insist on strict five-day tasks are defaulting to a “factory-style approach”.
In other words, it ignores the most basic reality: work changes.
“Those days when you were clocking in and out of an office job? That’s when you had typists. Now you don’t have them anymore,” Dixon said wealth. “Technological advances now mean you can manage everyone. No matter where they are.”
CEOs who insist on strict requirements are effectively rebuilding the Industrial Age mindset—exchanging punch cards for swipe passes—even as success is no longer measured by the time a person sits at their desk, but by the products they actually produce.
“There are people in the office who, unless you manage them, are not going to get more attention,” Dixon added. In this day and age, he believes, “You manage by output. You manage by activity. You don’t manage by walking.”
As he points out, it’s not just the way we work that has changed, but how easily we get distracted. Phone calls, Slack, endless browser tabs: physical presence is no longer a proxy for attention. Walking around the office to check who’s chatting doesn’t guarantee productivity, which is why dragging employees back to their desks in the name of performance reflects an outdated view of how work actually happens in the digital economy.
“I’m not clocking in here and there – by the way, computers do that, they can see when you’re logged in, when you’re logged out, and what you’re doing. You know what?”
“To be clear, every CEO wants their employees to be focused,” he explains. “But most modern companies do it in a more high-tech way, which is to let technology tell me whether people are working.
Remote-first companies have an AI edge
The debate about desks and attendance is largely a distraction. The real difference between companies right now is whether leadership is redesigning how work is measured, managed and scaled in the AI era.
“Forget where people work. If they don’t embrace AI, most companies will fall by the wayside,” Dixon emphasizes. “If you look at the winners and losers, the winners are the ones who embrace the technology”
People, not real estate, are a company’s most expensive asset. Dixon likes to remind other CEOs that their No. 1 cost is not office space, “it’s people,” and any serious AI strategy must start by supporting that investment, rather than insisting on keeping them in the same building for more days just because that’s what has been done in the past.
“Embrace technology as a whole – flexible working, flexible location, high-level technology, using technology to empower employees. Those are the companies that will win because they focus on people,” warns Dixon.
Additionally, as other leaders have noted, companies that focus on physical presence rather than remote, AI-driven work may fall behind their competitors.
Tech founder Brian O’Kelley founded Scope3 after selling AppNexus to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018. He believes remote companies like his have top talent globally and operate around the clock.
“The best companies will actually give up their offices and learn to work with non-physical employees,” O’Kelly said exclusively. Tell wealth. “Anyone who has a culture of returning to the office is actually doing themselves a disservice.”
Being spread across different time zones not only allows his staff to serve clients around the clock, it also forces the team to be more efficient and rely on the latest technology, which traditional office-based companies simply don’t have to do.
This is why companies that focus on existing rather than actually delivering the productivity gains of an AI-first future are at a disadvantage.
“The problem is, if you build a culture that’s asynchronous and remote, that means you’re building a culture that allows AI to thrive,” O’Kelly added. “If you’re building an office culture, you’re not actually building an AI-first ecosystem.”