Employees who use AI the most at work spend less time working alone and more time socializing with colleagues than employees who rarely touch it, according to Gensler’s 2026 Global Workplace Survey, based on responses from more than 16,400 office workers across 16 countries. Gensler’s data says the opposite of the common assumption is happening inside real offices right now.
The survey sorts workers into a category it calls AI Power Users, roughly 30% of the workforce, and compares them against Late Adopters, everyone still holding off. Power Users spend 37% of their workweek working alone, compared to 42% for Late Adopters. Power Users also spend 12% of their week learning versus 8% for Late Adopters — 1.5 times more learning time — and 11% of their week socializing compared to 9% for Late Adopters.
“We often assume that more technology means less connection. But our data tells a different story,” Janet Pogue McLaurin, Gensler’s global director of workplace research, said in the firm’s release of the findings. Gensler’s own summary states that AI Power Users “report stronger team relationships, greater encouragement to share new ideas, and more meaningful friendships at work.”
The likely mechanism isn’t mysterious once you see the time allocation. AI tools are absorbing the solo, repetitive parts of a workday, freeing up hours that Power Users appear to be redirecting toward the parts of work that still require another person. Learning time and socializing time both went up for the same group whose alone-time went down.
Gensler isn’t the only large workplace study finding this pattern. Microsoft’s own 2026 Work Trend Index, drawn from a survey of 20,000 knowledge workers, found that its equivalent group of power users don’t just use AI more often, they use it more deliberately: 53% said they consciously plan which tasks are worth handing to AI versus doing themselves, and 43% said they intentionally complete some tasks without AI at all, as reported by Inc.
Gensler’s survey also found the broader office is still struggling with something AI doesn’t touch: physical space. Employees spend 55% of a typical workweek in the office, 18% working from home, and 26% elsewhere. Within the office itself, workers report spending 39% of their time working alone and only 27% collaborating in person, a gap wide enough that two-thirds of employees say they’ve resorted to “hacking” their own workspace to compensate.
Put those two findings side by side and the picture of 2026’s office gets more specific: the technology that skeptics worried would isolate workers is, according to Gensler’s own data, correlated with more connection, not less.
