By Kathryn Yap - 5th November, 2026

WORKTECH26 NY: When Work Speeds Up, What Should the Workplace Do?

If AI accelerates production work, how might that reshape the needs of the workplace?

Across two days of WORKTECH26 New York, conversations around AI, workplace research, data, skills, and employee experience kept returning to the human work technology cannot simply speed up. The first day at DC 37 featured research findings, case studies, and emerging workplace models, while the WORKTECH New York Exchange at Standard Chartered shifted toward more interactive, small-group discussions and hands-on exercises.

Faster work, harder decisions

A recurring theme across these conversations was that faster production does not necessarily mean faster teamwork. As AI accelerates individual tasks, more of the work shifts toward judgment, coordination, learning, and deciding what happens next. That gives the office a different job: supporting the moments that benefit from people being together.

One question captured the shift particularly well: “If AI speeds up the doing, how do we speed up the deciding?” Aurelio David of LinkedIn shared an 11-week workplace pilot exploring how team proximity and project spaces could support smaller, more agile teams.

A related framework came from Morgan Weaving of Atlassian: ideation, calibration, and regulation—space for generating ideas, checking decisions, and recovering from the intensity of faster work. The emphasis was less on adding technology everywhere and more on supporting the work people still need to do with one another.

The day also surfaced a more basic challenge: access to AI does not automatically translate into useful adoption. Julia Lamm of PwC described differences in employees’ access, confidence, guidance, and time to experiment. New tools still need to fit into the reality of how people learn and work.

Turning the questions back on people

Building on these ideas, the event shifted into a more collaborative workshop format, giving participants an opportunity to reflect on emerging insights, exchange perspectives, and work through challenges with peers and colleagues. In an opening peer exchange led by Melissa Fisher, PhD, of Parsons School of Design at The New School, groups compared challenges around attendance, technology, stakeholder alignment, space, and data. Her 4P framework, people, places, policies, and partnerships, offered a way to consider these issues together. The discussion moved from sharing insights to exploring practical next steps: who connects the data, who owns the action, and whether workplace decisions actually improve people’s experience.

That question became more personal in Personas as an Operating Layer for the Workplace, a workshop facilitated by Melissa Marsh of PLASTARC. Participants started with familiar work-style profiles, then asked what those profiles left out: life stage, commute, motivations, preferences, and sensory needs. As Marsh put it, “None of this matters unless people actually come into the building.”

Working in pairs, participants turned those profiles into people through short interviews, then designed a “Gravity Day” around what would make coming in worthwhile. They considered what their persona wanted to accomplish, who and what they needed access to, and what was genuinely better in person before mapping a day through the workplace. The exercise highlighted the limits of designing around abstract user types alone, while connecting those qualitative insights back to organizational data such as utilization, HR, and training information.

Wrapping up the morning, Ege Aksu, PhD, of Revelio Labs, looked at how quickly the skills within familiar jobs are changing. Much of that shift, she showed, is happening within existing job titles. If titles no longer capture the full picture of how someone works, workplace strategy may need better ways to understand what people actually do, what they are learning, and where they need support.

Designing around what stays human

The WORKTECH program reinforced an important direction in PLASTARC's ongoing work on persona-driven workplaces and multisensory workplace design: using richer data to better understand people's diverse needs and translate those insights into more responsive workplace experiences.

As jobs, skills, and tools evolve, we see an opportunity to move beyond designing for fixed roles and instead focus on how people make decisions, learn, connect, and experience their environments. For PLASTARC, that means treating the workplace not as a finished product, but as an evolving environment that we continuously test, learn from, and adapt to better support people and their work.