AI May Be More Disruptive to the Office Market Than Economists Want to Admit

For the past, several years people have been asking my opinion about the office market and when it might recover. Since Covid, may submarkets have had 20+% vacancy rates, with major corporations still giving up space and companies seeming to be able to do more work in less space. Yes, many folks are still working from home, but on top of this is the elephant in the room…IA…“Tech industry leaders have been warning for several years that as AI grows more powerful, it could quickly take over a large share of human work, leading to widespread joblessness. It warns that the effects of AI could be “larger than the Industrial Revolution but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. Even if AI follows the same pattern in the long run, however, it could be hugely disruptive in the shorter term, potentially displacing millions of white-collar workers. “if you look at what robots did in the manufacturing sector, if AI does something equivalent in a more compressed time period, that would be really disruptive, really costly for people’s livelihoods,” Daron Acemoglu , professor at MIT, said.  Ben Casselman, writing in The New York Times July 13, 2026 My reply to the question at the beginning of this when folks ask my opinion of when the office market will fully-recover…not anywhere in the near or medium future. We have submarkets improving due to significant office building demolition to be replaced by housing, but AI is just getting started and if you ran a company that, using AI, could do the same work with half the workforce, what would you do?