Dan Ryan’s Post

The dedicated desk comeback is the one that I keep thinking about. We spent a decade commoditizing the workstation, and now more personalized setups might justify giving people their space again. But we'll only get this redesign right if we're actually measuring how people work instead of guessing--that's where a lot of our previous headaches originated from.

Great framing. The Propst analogy is apt — the risk isn't that we fail to imagine the right office for agentic AI, it's that cost optimization guts the vision before it takes hold. The "command center" conference room and augmented deep work spaces make sense, but most real estate decisions are still being made by people optimizing for utilization rates and lease costs, not cognitive output. The companies that get this right will likely be the ones where the people designing the space are also the ones using agents daily — not a facilities team working off 2019 assumptions. The office has always lagged the work. The question is how long the gap lasts this time.

Dan Ryan love the reminder on the "history" of the workplace and how it has transitioned over the years. 10 years ago I remember leaning on on the "Office of the Future" concept while at Asure Software and what a transition that was for companies. Now, a decade later, I agree we're in the middle of another shift. Much like 10 years ago, companies who embrace the shift will recruit the best talent and have the highest employee satisfaction rates.

Changing spaces is an interesting downstream impact from the people capital planning uncertainty right now. All the ratios are broken, and everyone is just trying stuff (if you ask any CRO how many BDRs he needs, he'll have no idea, but he's probably spamming my inbox with AI generated emails hoping it's effective, but knowing it's not). How we're working now is fundamentally different from how we did it a year ago and it will continue to shift in ways that are hard to predict.

The part about casual collision spaces resonates, the "serendipity thesis" has always been more aspiration than evidence, and the offices that win the next decade will be the ones that design around actual behavior, not the behavior they wish people had.

Really good article.. I am on voice inputs pretty much 100% of the time, and if I'm sitting in an open floor, that'll disturb everyone around me.. that's 1 small part of a larger transformation in how we work..

Most people assume AI agents make collaboration spaces more important. The opposite is true — agents make solo operators dramatically more leveraged. That means the ROI on focused individual space goes up, not down. Rewires the entire square footage allocation model.

What’s interesting from a content and research perspective is how quickly the narrative is shifting. It feels like we just caught up to hybrid, and now the next version of the office isn’t theoretical anymore, it’s already starting to take shape.

This reminds me of that episode of Mad Men when the first computer came to the office and took up half the floor. Technology will definitely keep shaping our physical workspaces.