The future of flexible work will not be decided by floor plans or badge swipes. It will be decided by who gets to build the tools.
Fresh evidence from a new global survey shows the shift in plain numbers. GoTo and Workplace Intelligence asked 2,500 people about AI and work in 2025. More than half say that AI will eventually make physical offices obsolete. A similar share prefer AI-enhanced remote work over being in the office, and strong majorities believe AI boosts balance, anywhere-productivity, and remote customer service.
A Microsoft global survey on AI at work found widespread adoption across roles and countries, with power users redesigning workflows and saving time every day. When employees can shape solutions themselves, adoption accelerates and the benefits compound.
According to the GoTo findings, most workers say AI gives them more flexibility and balance, allows them to work anywhere without losing productivity, and helps them serve customers remotely. Employees also say organizations should prioritize AI at least as much as amenities, reinforcing that flexibility is about empowerment rather than office perks.
Leaders do not need another debate about where people sit. They need a practical way to unlock performance across distributed teams, giving people the flexibility to work where they are most effective. Empowering employees to build their own AI tools delivers that path.
Empowerment is not just access to a chatbot; rather, it is the ability for an accountant, a customer success manager, or a field engineer to build and refine the AI that runs in their flow of work. Modern low-code platforms now make this practical at scale.
Microsoft’s Copilot Studio, as one example, provides security and governance controls that let admins and makers create and monitor agents that automate tasks and tap enterprise data under policy. Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Studio offers low-code AI builders for customer relationship management so that admins can embed actions, prompts and models into workflows without heavy engineering lift. These platforms are designed so that non-specialists can assemble robust assistants in days, while IT sets guardrails that keep data and actions safe.
Organizations that lean into citizen development are already seeing momentum. Developers and technologists report strong and rising use of AI at work in the 2024 developer survey, even as trust in outputs remains a live issue that training and governance must address. The lesson is straightforward: When employees build the bots, flexibility stops being a concession and becomes a performance strategy.
Hybrid work has entered a durable equilibrium across many economies. A 2025 working paper on global persistence shows that average work-from-home days stabilized after 2022, with meaningful cross-country variation but steady patterns among college-educated employees. That stability reflects a simple truth: Flexible work survives when teams can maintain quality from anywhere, which is exactly what employee-built AI tools enable.
The productivity record for flexible work is stronger than the headlines suggest. A randomized trial of hybrid work found improved satisfaction and a sharp drop in quit rates without harming performance when teams worked a mix of home and office days. At the task level, a study of a generative AI assistant for customer support agents showed a 14 percent boost in average productivity, with the largest gains for less experienced workers. These findings match what practitioners report when employees can tailor assistants to real tasks. AI absorbs low-value steps, standardizes quality and frees time for creative or customer-facing work, which is the essence of sustainable flexibility.
When people customize tools to their roles, the benefits arrive faster than in top-down rollouts. The 2024 Work Trend Index shows that power users do more than speed up tasks. They rethink workflows, delegate routine work to the AI, and use saved time for higher-impact activities.
The key is to formalize employee-built AI as a governed practice. The good news is that tooling and guidance exist to make this practical.
The strategic case for investing in employee-made AI is equally clear. An analysis of generative AI’s economic potential estimates significant productivity gains across major business functions through 2040, provided organizations redeploy time and redesign processes. None of those gains arrive fully formed; they appear when teams map their work and build targeted assistants that remove the drag of repetitive steps. The missing piece in many companies is permission and support to build, not just to use.
Leaders can put this into motion now, treating AI creation as part of the employee experience and celebrating wins publicly so that maker-behavior becomes culture.
Flexible work is not a temporary concession. It is the operating model of a global economy that rewards adaptability, speed and customer focus. Give employees the platforms, training and guardrails to create their own copilots, and flexible work becomes a source of advantage rather than a compromise. The organizations that move from controlling where people sit to empowering what people build will set the standard for productivity, connection and collaboration, wherever work happens.
Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., serves as the CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and authored the best-seller “Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams.”