Last year marked a major shift in return-to-office mandates. For the first time since the pandemic, more than half of Fortune 100 companies moved from hybrid setups to fully in-office policies. But Mark Dixon, CEO and founder of International Workplace Group (IWG), has a message for JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and any CEO demanding a return to the office: You’re not serious about AI.
From his vantage point, running the world’s largest flexible office provider—with more than 8 million users across 122 countries and 85% of the Fortune 500 among its customers—Dixon believes that bosses clinging to rigid, five-day mandates are defaulting to a “factory-style approach.”
In other words, it ignores the most basic reality: Work has changed.
“Those sort of days of clocking in, clocking out in office work? That was when you had typists. You don’t have them anymore,” Dixon tells Fortune. “Tech advances now mean you can manage everyone. It doesn’t matter where they are.”
CEOs clinging to rigid mandates are effectively re-creating an industrial-era mindset—swapping punch cards for swipe passes—even though the measure of success is no longer how many hours someone sits at a desk, but what they actually produce.
“Having people in an office, it doesn’t get more focus unless you manage them,” Dixon adds. In today’s age, he argues, “you manage by outputs. You manage by activity. You don’t manage by walking.”
As he points out, it’s not just how we work that has changed—it’s how easily we get distracted. Phones, Slack, endless browser tabs: Physical presence is no longer a proxy for attention. Walking the office floor to check who’s chatting doesn’t guarantee productivity, which is why dragging workers back to desks in the name of performance reflects an outdated view of how work actually happens in a digital economy.
“I’m not sort of going around and doing time clocks—and by the way, the computer does that, they can see what time you log on, what time you log off, and what you are doing. You know that?” he notes.
“Just to be clear, every CEO wants their people [to] focus,” he explains. “But most modern companies are doing it [with] more of a high-tech approach, which is ‘Let the technology tell me whether people are working or not.’”
Remote-first companies have an AI advantage
The debate over desks and attendance is largely a distraction. What’s actually separating companies right now is whether leadership is redesigning how work is measured, managed, and scaled in an AI era.
“Forget about where people are working. Most companies will go by the wayside if they don’t embrace AI,” Dixon stresses. “If you look at winners and losers, the winners are the ones that embrace the technology.”
People, not real estate, are a company’s most expensive asset. Dixon likes to remind fellow CEOs that their number one cost isn’t office space, “it’s people,” and that any serious AI strategy has to start with supporting that investment—not insisting they spend more days in a single building just because that’s how things used to be done.
“Embracing the whole of the technology—which is flexible work, flexible location, high levels of technology, using technology to get more out of your people. Those will be the winning companies, because they focus on the people,” Dixon warns.
Plus, as other leaders have pointed out, firms that focus on physical presence rather than remote, AI-driven work risk falling behind competitors.
Brian O’Kelley, the tech founder who sold AppNexus to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018, before founding Scope3, argued that remote firms, like his, have the top pick of top global talent and operate around the clock.
“The best companies are going to actually dump their offices to learn to work with non-bodied employees,” O’Kelley exclusively told Fortune. “Anybody who has a back-to-office culture is actually hurting themselves.”
Being spread across time zones doesn’t just make his workforce available to customers at all hours of the day—it forces teams to be efficient and lean on the latest tech in ways traditional office-based companies simply don’t need to.
That’s why companies fixated on presence rather than productivity gains that actually enable an AI-first future are at a disadvantage.
“The thing is, if you build a culture that’s asynchronous and remote, it means you’re building a culture for AI to thrive,” O’Kelley added. “If you’re building an office culture, you are actually not building an AI-first ecosystem.”
