AI May Forever Impact the Need for Office Space

There are a number of major factors that might prevent to return of a healthy office market. The pandemic showed corporations that they can be extremely profitable even with many of their employees working from home, and even though many companies now have RTO mandates ‘the toothpaste once out of the tube can be hard to get back in’. Another factor is GSA potentially shedding 100 million square feet of office space, either in early terminations, non-renewals or disposing of unneeded office buildings. However, the third reason is Artificial Intelligence allowing companies to do much more with much fewer employees. As an example, in the East Bay Business Times 3/24/25 discussing how young startups in Silicon Valley may be pursuing a different path to growth and financial success than those startups in previous years. “ut like many young startups in Silicon Valley today, Gamma is pursuing a different strategy. It is using AI tools to increase its employees’ productivity in everything from customer service and marketing to coding and customer research. That means Gamma, which makes software that lets people create presentations and websites, has no need for more cash, Lee said. His company has hired only 28 people to get “tens of millions” in annual recurring revenue and nearly 50 million users. Gamma is also profitable. “If we were from the generation before, we would easily be at 200 employees,” Lee said. “We get a chance to rethink that, basically rewrite the playbook.”…” Stories of “tiny team” success have now become a meme, with techies excitedly sharing lists that show how Anysphere, a startup that makes the coding software Cursor, hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than two years with just 20 employees, and how ElevenLabs, an AI voice startup, did the same with about 50 workers. The potential for AI to let startups do more with less has led to wild speculation about the future. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted there could someday be a one-person company worth $1 billion.” What if this also creates similar profitability potential with much fewer employees for companies in general?  What are your thoughts on this?

“