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Design is re-imagining the places where we work and travel, making them more multipurpose and multifunctional. An architect from the world’s largest architecture firm shows how offices, airports, and lifestyle spaces are evolving to offer more flexibility, choice, and connection to serve professional and personal needs simultaneously.

When Work is an Experience (Not a Place)

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From designing corporate culture, we moved to designing corporate spaces. More and more where we work and travel are not just places but entire experiences. Rae Wen, who leads the Hong Kong office for the global design and architecture firm Gensler, has over 20 years specializing in workplace and hospitality projects. He and Fortune's Kristen Soler will explore how offices and airports are evolving, offering much more choice, flexibility, and connection. Please welcome them. All right, Ray, thank you so much for joining me. So Ray, clearly the future of work in the world of work has changed a lot in the past couple of years. So I want to start by asking you what is the most surprising way that people are working today that you didn't anticipate 5 years ago and how are you designing for that today? Um, I think the most exciting thing is work is not work anymore because after COVID, even before COVID, you can work anywhere. Uh, what COVID did was just supercharged it, so I don't know about you guys, but I work 24/7 a week since the phone is there. Some pinged me because we work with US time, European time. You just got to be attentive to your clients, especially global clients, and I think that's the biggest change right now for a lot of the workplace designers, and for me personally, I think it's such an exciting. Um, time in the workplace design arena. Yeah, now I know you said people can work from anywhere, but there are a lot of companies that are requiring their employees to come back into the office 5 days a week. How are you thinking about that, about workers who might be reluctant to come back into an office and return to the office, and how, what does that tell you about kind of employee behavior that corporate leaders are still overlooking? I think the two biggest challenges for a lot of the um corporate real estate heads and Fortune 5G companies is I've got so much asset and if people can work anywhere, how can I drive the utilization up? That's really what the biggest problem to solve. And with AI and technology, a lot of us can't forecast how much head count we're going to have next year. So it used to be like back 10 years ago, I'll get a spreadsheet from a client, oh yeah, this is day 2, day 3 forecast, I'm gonna hire this many people, we'll go do the plan and design. These days that answer just keeps shifting. So what are the biggest changes and challenges is how do we bring people back and make the space transformational so the utilize this can go up. So we're no longer in. The headquarters and campus at least we're no longer just designing workplaces, we're actually designing experiences because if you think of what bringing us together as human beings is, well, if I can work anywhere, why do I want to go to work? I can do it at home. So you really got to make the campus or the workplace be more than work, um, and that's the fun part of it. And from that I just saw a quick slide. Yeah, let's see. We do um surveys every year. I thought this was really interesting. Um, this is actually an employee survey that Genza do annually, um, and then this year in 2025, we, we asked them, you know, from my experience and point of view, what makes a great workplace. And if you look at the top 10, it's really food. It's about wellness, they didn't even mention anything about work, like everybody just like pick all the stuff that really, that we want as a human being. I mean this morning, if you listen to our topics, it's all about that user experience, that human experience, whether it's. About, um, a stadium or workplace or hospitality, is that is the thing that brings us together. Uh, and I think right now, um, what we are doing more than ever is creating teams that can deliver these experiences. Um, I used to have a team of, you know, um, probably 80% workplace designers, planners, strategists, and then 20% probably could do a little bit of breakout and a bit of FFNE, um, but these days I've got event planners. I've got like someone who's full FMB, um, FFME expert, uh, work in hotels, etc. um, and then we talk about experience. What is the entrance experience for the guests, um, how do they mingle with the back of house staff? Like that's the type of conversation that we talk about. So that's a very different landscape. Can you give me an example of something really interesting you designed for a workplace centered around the food experience? Um, yes. I just clicked this slide because it's very similar to this, um, I can't show you the project I'm talking about, this is in super here, uh, project I worked on, um, very passionately this, it was during COVID, it was completed, it was uh 500 square, um, Uh, 50,000 square meters, so roughly around 5000 square feet, um, and the brief from the client was we now got people 50% of my of their staff whilst working from home. Um, how do we bring them back? So we brainstormed with all the stakeholders and the people who are putting money on the table to design this new headquarters in Shua, um, and it turns out in the end we designed it like 15 different food offerings, including trying to bring blue bottle in, uh, we end up, Designing a secret bar that was basically vinyl bar, those of you who have been to Tokyo, it's really big where they got um they play vinyl, you're not allowed to really talk, it's a silent bar. So it's like a no tech bar which is similar to a library concept where you don't talk to your phone, etc. but they just put a spin on it, and that became a memorable experience where everybody go to that headquarter, can I go to the secret bar? And it becomes a story for that global organization. That's the iconic moment. In Tokyo, so that that's a really exciting, uh, still to this day one of the most amazing projects I've worked on. That is really cool, I think. When I think about your job, the toughest part, I think, is you have on one hand you have employees who are like, that is so cool. I would love to go to a record bar. And then on the other hand you have employees that are like, I don't want to spend any more time in the office, and you're tricking me with free food and a bar and this is not going to help me want to go back into the office. How do you, how do you thread the needle and are there any, you know, tricks and tips you use when you're when you're thinking about that, um. It depends on our organization, obviously, because, um, if you work with a tech client versus a financial um client, very different, um, although they both want great experiences, but the kind of offer, um, that they need for other things, other for their staff, in terms of guest experience slightly different, um, there's a lot more labs, um, and also maker space within tech. um, so what we realize now. Um, we used to design for a lot of headquarters, we designed 80%, we leave 20% for the client to flex. What's actually happened now is we designed 50%. The other 50% has to be transformational. So what I mean by that is we are designing less and less built in space, furniture, modularity and removable items, so you can transform a space when you need to from a, Whether it's an FNB for the staff and then transmit event space or a happy hour space for your clients, um, and where you put those within the building it's also very important accessibility from the guest experience, but you also got to be very careful about security because we're working with companies here. So that type of complexity is actually making workplace almost like um creating a mixed use, I call a city in a city, um, and it's, it's very exciting. And a good example is actually this global client of ours. Um, if I didn't tell you, you wouldn't know Sanofi is actually a pharmaceutical R&D, um, tech company. Um, you know, we, we used to think if you're into, um, medical, um, and pharmaceutical, you have white box and say this is the staff and client, um, cafeteria canteen. Um, which is to me, you'll find that in any restaurant, but if you really look carefully at the furniture, it's removable, um, it's layered. It's got different zone, but we try to figure a way how can you transform this space when you need to, but you can still have this space for happy hour, etc. And because work is always on the go, and I think maybe everyone in this room is guilty of, you know, doing their work from an airport on their way to this conference, I know you're also transforming airports and lounge spaces as well. Tell me a bit more about that. Ah, that's a, that's another thing, um, so because we now can work anywhere, uh, what we are finding, I'm gonna skip some of this lie, I'll go straight to the airport. Um, we found that airport is now the new, it's not a transit hub anymore. It's actually a new place where you recharge. Depending on day you go on business or you dare to travel, um, the need at the airport is very different. We used to just go there, check in, it takes forever to line up, right? Now a lot of airports, what they're trying to do is reduce that time to check in. And they're trying to increase the time so you can linger at the after check-in to enjoy the FNB, enjoy the lounges, enjoy whether you want to work, rest, or relax, whatever you want to do, they want to provide that. Um, and surprisingly, um, I mean this is a new terminal that's coming out of JFKK. we now got a lot more outdoor indoor space, natural light, past the actual, um, check-in area. Uh, airports used to be just like you check in, you'd be sitting there waiting. If you're lucky, you're business class or whatever, you're going to go to a lounge, but now it's even just a normal going through the airport you can experience all that. It's a destination. It's no longer just a transit. That's what I think is also interesting about what you do is that you're both creating, you're you're designing these terminals, these lounges as high performance workspaces in and of themselves. Does that risk airports competing with offices? who are you looking to please when you design all this stuff? I think they're becoming. Like all areas of practices, is becoming more and more overlapped. Um, I summarize this just to give a high level. This is what you expect an airport lounge now. It's, it's really about that full, uh, work, play live and rest and recharge, it's all those items expected. So designing these small lounges, you've got to create a setting that have all the layers that cater for whether it's at work or other things and, That's, it becomes a lot more rich the entire experience, um, and that's what we are seeing and it's very exciting. What are some of the most interesting features that you've designed for in an airport or in a lounge that you think are totally things that no one's thinking of? Uh, massage room is getting more and more common. Um, it's, it's almost even if, if those of you fly with Cathay, um, they've had. Massage and wellness for a while, at least in the first class, but it's almost that it's becoming much more of a norm. Like it's not just the best premiere, you'll get that all around the world you see a lot more wellness factor adding in, whether they go full massage chair or massage bed with mass, um, they're going to give that. Offer and that's getting more and more about not just a transitional waiting space, it's how can I make people feel better, more positive flying with a specific airline and that directly relates to their brand. Uh, at the end of the day, all this is still to do business. Nothing comes for free, right? Um, so it's all about trying to express their culture through the experience of the lounge, the airport for the city, and for headquarter to represent that, uh, Fortune 500 company. Now we've talked about the customer. I want to talk about the client because expectations, I think, have changed for you, especially with the advent of AI and predictive analytics. Talk to me about how that has changed your process for for prototyping and what your clients expect from you today, for better or for worse. Um, yeah, exactly, for better or worse. So I will skip this one. It's just one of the new lounges, um, Minor Iconic. I think everything this morning is about more about architecture, big space. I think interiors, we are much more about those, um, the things you can touch and what you can remember when you go through the space experience. So these days there is just a lounge and also a JFK, um, but the hardest thing is we used to get a lot of time to design these, uh, you know, you can, you can say anything up to one year. The challenge for us is we now are expected to produce record speed. Um, one particular client is that I want this in light speed, Ray, light speed. OK, I go what do you mean like light can you just give me ASAP like now, um, so it's quite interesting because AI has transformed how we work. If you look at what I've got up in the screen, the left hand side is a project I worked on around 2 years ago. Um, so what we used to do, I'm more old school, so I'll do hand sketch ideas, narrate it, and start working with my team on looking at the 3D model, we build physical model as well just to see how the space goes, and eventually get to a semi-final one. These are not final output, these are just work in progress. Um, that would take probably about 1 to 2 weeks, depending on the project complexity. Um, the one on the right, that was just last week. Um, it was 1 day, full on, we built a white model first. The client gave us basically 2 to 3 days. It's like the reason he told me, well, I saw my friend clicking on Nano Banana, those of you know that app. Um, and say, well, if they can do it in a second, why can't design firms can do it quicker? So we end up going, OK, because it's hard to explain to a client when they're not architects. Um, as designers we see design as more time, craftsmanship, and you kind of. Bit by bit, get to a result that is the perfect graph, whereas what we're seeing a lot more with the AI, we're now almost like a creator, like all these art pieces, and we try to select what is suitable and that's the only way we can manage that um need from client on speed and time. Um, and it's, you see positive or negative, I think it really depends on the project. Um, your project got time, of course, you can have a lot more ideation and use it as a tool. Um, but what we're seeing more right now is clients asking for immediate response is, it's the trend. I mean, everyone is just so used to clicking and getting it straight away, and they're expecting from the consultants, and I think it's not going to go away. Um, the clients who give you time, um, like what Populists had for the uh the Pearl in Hong Kong and Um, the hotels with Andre food, that's being more rare. There's still those clients, but I think the clients who expect immediate outcomes, we're going to have to find a workflow that can achieve what they need. Now Ray, in our last minute together, I have one last question for you about the future. What's the future scenario that Genzler is actively designing for that most companies haven't even imagined yet that you think is going to be the next big trend of the future? Tomorrow we're going to launch our annual design forecast. This is the 14th edition. I can't answer all that because actually all in here. OK, we're going to share it with everyone today, but I asked, they said no, you've got to wait till tomorrow. All right, what a, what a teaser for all of us to look forward to tomorrow. But the big big one is about experience. It's all about experience, whether you're in a workplace or you're in retail or you're in hospitality, it's all about experience focus. Well, thank you so much, Ray, and good luck with that tomorrow. Thank you.

Improvisation is a skill needed by creatives, and improv can delight theater audiences. Is improvisation the ultimate test for artificial intelligence? Since 2016, Piotr Mirowski has deployed AI as a creativity support tool for live improvised theater performances with a cast of humans and robots, engaging audiences at Edinburgh Fringe about generative AI, storytelling, and ethical co-creation with machines.

Making Stuff Up: Improvising LLMs and Spontaneous Robots

Had some great conversations during the roundtables. How many people went? Raise your hand. Yeah, all right. They were both really good. I popped up my head into both of them. Now we're switching gears and getting a little bit more spontaneous. Our next session explores a fascinating idea. Is improvisation the ability to be funny and respond creativity cre creatively in the moment? Something that's hard for humans to get right to, in addition to speaking apparently, the ultimate test for AI to show us what that looks like in action, please join me in welcoming research scientist at Google DeepMind and director of the Improbotics Theater, Pyt Mirovski. What you gonna do? Hello, London. So, hello. Let me leave that thing and unplug the little robot and maybe say a few words about myself. I do have a day job, um, and as a matter of fact, I was studying computer science and improv for a very long time, almost like 20 years, each of those. And I did my PhD at NYU with a professor called Jan Lukan back in the time when he still had time for students and back in the time where AI was a dirty word, we had to avoid it putting in publications in order to get accepted. And in my day job I've been working on various AI research, for instance, learning to navigate or learning to predict the weather, essentially trying to make up things that happen in the future using machine learning. So that's essentially my day job, but in the evening I've been going to theater school, to drama school in London, and also doing improv comedy as well. I really love theater and I love improvisation because improvisation is one way to really engage and connect with the audience. Um, some researchers, some academics have defined improvisation as real time dynamic problem solving. Other academics like Gla Spolin and Keith Johnstone have talked about spontaneity, being a 6 year old again and doing the most obvious thing, which is surprisingly difficult once you become an adult. Improvisation is all about reacting in split seconds to whatever is thrown at you and saying the most obvious thing that comes to your mind. And if you want to see some improv in London, you can go to see our friends from showstoppers who improvise a two-hour musical, uh, every month, fully from scratch. So, this is improv. Uh, one of the reasons why improv is so valued in business environments is that it's all about collaboration and it's about learning to listen to your stage partner. So something happened in my mind about 9 years ago. I was working um at Bing. Um, at Microsoft on the 2nd most popular search engine Bing, and I was working on query autocompletion trying to basically predict what people are going to tell based on the context, and I was doing improv and then I realized that there was a strange connection being delivered two things machine learning, maximizing the likelihood, and being obvious, saying the most obvious thing on your mind, so that. How the idea of improvising with a robot came to be. So I built an AI. I trained a language model on the dialogue from 100,000 films from open subtitles. That was 8 years ago, and I brought this on stage and I called the AI and the robot Alex Artificial Language experiment. And the way this worked, I had a microphone. I would speak to the robot using speech recognition, and it would use a language motor to reply. Nothing surprising for anyone who has used an AI system in the last few years. And of course the AI would take typically, I don't know, 5 seconds to come up with an answer, which seemed an eternity on stage. So I had to actually make up for that. I was improvising alone, but soon after I met someone fantastic, Corey Matheson, a PhD student in robotics in Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, an improviser at the Rapid Fire Theater who had the same idea. So I wrote to him a 3000 word email. He flew to London the day after. We met. We became friends. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and we started working together. From Corey's perspective, improvisation. is the art of making your stage partner look good on stage. It's not about you, it's about them. He would have this shtick where he would invite someone from the audience who never did improv before, and he would make him look good, make her look good for 15 minutes on stage. So we created this company Inrobotics human Machine, and we started doing improv shows remotely via Zoom or Skype, and we had this show in London and Portland, Oregon, 8 time zones apart of that's what we thought until we realized the day before that actually, you know, daylight setting time is not always coordinated. So that created a bit of a logistical problem. And also, um, the previous show of a run, we didn't have time to check the microphone levels. The robot literally crashed and burned on stage. Everything was going wrong. And the reviewer came. And they wrote 2 stars chaotic, never worked with robots to a PhD student in robotics and to someone who was working on robots in his daytime, daytime. Did we listen? Absolutely not. So we created this theater company where we actually replaced the robot by humans, getting lines the earpiece from the AI and essentially becoming the embodiment, the cyborg, improvising with all the humans on stage, and that's how it looks in practice. We have an AI system that generates lots of candidates, lots of suggestions. There is a curator, a human in the loop who is choosing the best lines, the least offensive, or maybe the ones that make most sense, and we want to show that to the audience because we want to make sure that the audience understands that AI is not about an oracle giving an answer, but it's about a stochastic parrot generating answers all the time, and it's up to you to choose the best one. And one of the improvisers wear a headset, wears a headset, and they deliver the lines with physicality, emotional expression, etc. We have been evolving the formats. We have created 4 different companies in 4 different countries. We have been publishing academic research on the subject in human computer interaction, and we have replaced the earpieces by augmented variety glasses, which we might know later. And we have also been working on telepresence. How do we improvise during COVID where everyone is miserable at home. Everyone gets a green screen, and one of us is live video DJing us to place two improvisers on a horse or in a car or in a bathtub and see what happens next. Uh, so this is a demo of the system during COVID. We have also worked on live translation because that's the origin of large language models, translation, and we have done multilingual shows where one person may speak in Polish, another one in French, and both get understood because they have live translation. So does the audience. We have incorporated image generation, exploring PowerPoint generation, uh, you know, improvised TED Talks, PowerPoint karaoke made by AI. Or even incorporated deep fakes in a very consensual way to basically inform the audience about the potential to actually get a live deep fake in real time and to explore maybe a more fun aspect of it while informing about the potential dangers of all the technologies. This is something I've been doing on my side, but I've also incorporated it in my day job working on social technical aspects of AI. For instance, 3 years ago we worked on scriptwriting and playwriting using large language models before Chad GPT was released, and we partnered with playwrights and screenwriters to explore the potentials of the tools and its limitations. or we have also been talking to comedians and to artists about all the possible uses of AI that empower the artists instead of replacing them, and that's all that I have to say, but I believe that Andrew has a few more questions. So welcome, welcome back, Andrew. OK. All right, so all of this is fantastic. I just want to say, uh, I'm, I'm a drummer, OK, so, uh, you know, we, we start with the fundamentals of jazz when you, when you learn how to play drums and so improvisation is a core component of that, and I love that. Um, I wanna ask you, so how much of AI is art versus science? And I'm thinking more about your day job than I am about this. How much of AI is art instead of science? I think there's a lot of An artistic approach to AI that is very useful in understanding the um affordances. Um, I've been very lucky to, to meet many artists working with AI in 2016. who have been exploring the glitch aesthetic and everything that doesn't work with AI to actually make work of art out of that and and they literally build upon the work on explaining AI, explaining convolutional networks. So there's a very interesting partnership that happens that kind of replicates what poets were doing with drugs in the 19th century. Am I making a comparison? Sort of, yes. Um, you have done a lot of different work in, in building your career, your day job, um, in, in different areas, navigation you've worked on, you've worked on, um, climate modeling. So what have you learned from that that you're putting in this work? Yes, um, directly climate models, there is the stochastic aspect which is vital to climate models. That's essentially how we get forecasts of the potential outcomes. You change initial conditions and you're keeping the same dynamical model, you get radically different outcomes. And so when we look at both extremely scary curves of the rise of temperature over the last 8 years, it might rise by only 1.5 degrees or by as much as 80 degrees. And this, uh, this is an illustration of a stochastic aspect of AI model. You my. With some crackling from microphone, um, that, um, I am trying to convey when coming on stage and in improv this is the same principle that we listen to minute details in somebody's conversation in. Happens on stage. What happens in the audience, and we get influenced by that and we use it in our creative practice to get inspired and to radically change the outcome of a scene. So huge parallels here. Fantastic. Well, we've only got 3 minutes left, so why don't we actually try this thing? What do you think, folks? Yes, let's improv. All right, so what I have here is a little bit of a system that will help Andrew improvise. So Andrew, have you done theater or improv? What's that? Have you done improv and theater? I have done theater in high school, but it's been a long time. Yes, have you been terrified by having to find to remember your lines? Oh, who, who isn't? Who isn't? Whose line is it anyway? Yes, yes. Well, what if I tell them what I'm seeing? Yes, what you're seeing right now on this, on these augmented related glasses is light generated by AI. And from now on, Andrew, if you can hold the phone, of course, you can only, and you can only say AI generated lines. So let's see how this is going and if. All right, so I am typing a prompt, activating the system. Don't look fashionable. All right, rebooting the system. This is a live demo. Yeah. It's coming up, um. Yes, it is coming up in those very long moments of silence on stage. So what I see are a bunch of different options in my uh in my glasses. Um, it's, it had generated um different responses and I can choose which which to deliver to in our conversation. All right. So if I say something, it's saying hello, yes. Hi, AI. Nice to be here. Well, Hello, hello, Andrew. From now on you are only controlled by AI. You can only say lines that you see in front of you. We are here at the convention center and uh we, let's imagine that we are in, um, at a bar. Do you want some drink? Can I help you? Sounds ambitious. All right. I knew you would think that, Andrew. Well, here's your Negroni. Thank you. Right, Andrew, we've been good friends. We've been living in New York, um, 15 years ago and enjoying the city. Is there something that you really remember and that inspired you when you were in New York? Oh, the rats, the rats, of course. Well, and that is the end of the show. Thank you very much. Thank you, Andrew, of course. All right. Let me pull this down and get out of the stage. You've been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

From spontaneous backpacking trips to AI-powered, hyper-personalized itineraries, travel has undergone a radical transformation. In this episode of Leadership Next, hosts Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller sit down with Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel to explore the future of travel. Glenn reflects on his early experiences navigating the world before smartphones, how AI is revolutionizing trip planning, and why personalization is key to the industry's evolution. He also discusses Booking Holdings’ rapid growth, its response to global crises like the Ukrainian refugee situation, and the industry’s potential next frontier—hypersonic travel. Plus, he shares insights on leading through uncertainty, the resilience of the travel industry, and why, despite a lifetime of global adventures, his favorite place to travel is home.

The Connected Trip: Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel on the Future of Travel

Photo Courtesy of Booking Holdings; Graphic by Fortune

Leadership

Vishal Harnal, Global Managing Partner, 500 Global Kathy Matsui, General Partner, Mpower Partners Weisheng Neo, General Partner, Qualgro Wei Zhou, Founding Managing Partner, Ccv Moderated By Jeff John Roberts, Fortune

Innovation Forum 2024: Venture Capitalists Predict Megatrends Of Tomorrow

Vishal Harnal, 500 Global, Kathy Matsui, Mpower Partners, Weisheng Neo, Qualgro Wei Zhou, Founding Managing Partner, Ccv Moderated By Jeff John Roberts, Fortune

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