I think the future of work looks less like an office and more like a garden. Let me tell you what made me sure of it.
Last week, I visited Saint Haven, the private longevity club that started in Melbourne and is now open in Sydney. It is genuinely extraordinary. Full body scans, blood testing, cryotherapy, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, ice baths, saunas, and a meditation cave. Money and ambition are pouring into living longer, and these clubs will soon be popping up all over the world.
And yet I walked out with one thought I could not shake. For all its brilliance, the one thing it was missing was nature. It is a perfectly climate-controlled temple to longevity, and almost none of it harnesses nature itself. No sun on your skin unless a lamp is simulating it. We’ve become so adept at engineering health that we build it indoors, away from the very conditions the body was designed for. And yes, climate-controlled rooms allowed us to work for long stretches in comfort, but somewhere we started to lose the connection to being outside. And time in nature is not just a nice-to-have. The drop in stress hormones from simply being among trees is already a well-proven treatment.
Whether it’s the office or these new private longevity clinics, we keep building brilliant boxes to control our environment for optimised work and health, pushing nature further down the priority list.
And this is where I think AI can revolutionise the way we work. I have been thinking about the work desk and the history behind it. I can’t help but see a future where it doesn’t exist anymore. Currently, we accept that good work happens sitting at a desk under artificial light for most of the day. But creativity, inspiration, and energy come from looking at expansive views, getting our thoughts in motion through walking by ourselves or with others, and regulating our nervous system in calm, quiet natural settings.
I am writing this from outside. I am barefoot on the grass, holding my phone in my hand, and I am speaking more than typing. We do not need to accept the discomfort of spending most of the day at a desk under artificial light. As a solo knowledge worker, it is easier for me to say, but I also know modern workplaces no longer have to be this way. I spent ten years inside them, and workplace design is the intersection I care about most.
A lot of the work I used to need other people for, I now do alongside an AI tool. I talk; it listens, it drafts, it organises, and it hands the work back. The more I lean into AI, the more I want to phase out my desk and my laptop. The coordinating, the chasing, the status updates, the sitting side by side being busy, AI is quietly absorbing all of it. This is not about working alone forever. It is close to the opposite. When AI takes over coordination, the gathering of people can finally become what it should have always been. To solve something hard. Build on each other's half-formed ideas. Share a laugh and let the energy of the room shift from pensive thinking to euphoric discussion when an idea clicks. This connection only happens when people have the space to be themselves and preferably in nature too.
It's not easy to get people to be themselves at work. Titles and job descriptions influence how we think and act. Annual goals are set and reviewed two to four times a year to judge your effort. This controlled structure prevents companies from making full use of the skills, knowledge and creativity of their employees. Moreover, the urgency to finish tasks swiftly often prevents us from fully exploring our creative potential, leading to a sense of regret for not leaving a meaningful imprint on our projects.
Many studies have explored how to build high-performing teams, and the number one aspect is psychological safety. The shared belief that team members won't be punished or humiliated for taking risks, such as asking questions, raising concerns, or admitting mistakes. But when you have all the pressures above that box a human into a controlled aspect for coordination at large scale, psychological safety becomes very difficult to achieve.
But let’s look at what makes this difficult. For most of corporate history, the way we proved our worth was output. Hours logged, tasks closed, and work visibly produced. You can't run a thousand people on trust alone, so you run them on metrics and control instead. It was a hack to address the high cost of coordination. And that’s exactly the kind of coordination that AI is eating up.
So, let’s fast forward to the future, though I don’t know what that future timeline looks like. The pace of AI disruption is so mind boggling that it is not hard to see such a transformation happening in the next few months or next few years.
AI is about to do the measurable, output-based work faster and cheaper than any of us. The moment AI can produce the thing we are being scored on, scoring humans on it becomes pointless.
We need to explore reframing what human value is inside a company. There are things AI can't fake, at least for now: presence, judgement, taste, and creative response.
And before you say presence cannot be measured, that is the point. The goal was never to measure everything. The goal was to stop measuring the wrong thing. We do not need to tell people what to do. We need to give them the autonomy to figure it out. Why else did we hire them if not for their critical thinking, creativity, and skill?
Which flips the whole relationship with technology. Right now we go to the tech. We sit at the desk, open the laptop, and type away. It should be the other way around. The tech should come to us. Wherever the good work is actually happening: Under a tree, on a walk, in the middle of a conversation.
This is why talking to AI, rather than typing, matters more than it first appears. Your voice works anywhere. A keyboard ties you to a desk. Work can follow you into the places that actually make you think, instead of being forced out of you at a desk.
We are already learning to shape work around our rhythms. Anyone who has tracked their sleep or energy with a wearable knows when they feel sharp and when they feel spent. Owning that signal and arranging the day around it is the same instinct workplaces should have when designing their spaces.
And so this brings us back to psychological safety: when humans no longer feel threatened or judged by the performative metrics they must adhere to, they can more easily take off their professional armour and show up as the real human they are outside of work. We focus on creating a work environment that helps people be present, energised, and ready to play. This is where irreducible human value resides, the stuff AI can’t fake, and why it becomes the new metric without the judgement that stifles psychological safety.
The desk is the first thing we can let go of. The table we sit around to create something together is the last.
So I have started asking a different question. If the desk was only ever an interface, and the interface is shifting to voice, then what would we build if we were no longer trying to control coordination? What would we build if we were simply trying to help humans think, create, feel alive, and make things together?
WeWork re-imagined the office around people and connection instead of rows of desks. Now we are building longevity temples to optimise both body and mind. The next step might be ‘NatureWork’, a workplace built around nature, where technology serves as a fluid tool that meets people where and when they need it. All I know is that the future workplace does not start with a better desk, and it does not end behind glass walls.