The numbers come first. The average New Yorker spends roughly 53 minutes on a train to reach an office, according to IWG research conducted with global engineering consultancy Arup. That same research concludes long daily commutes could be extinct by 2040.
Mark Dixon, CEO of IWG — the world's largest workspace provider — told Fortune that future generations will find the concept of commuting as baffling as pre-electric candlelight. 'In the future, you're going to explain to your kids that you used to commute,' Dixon said, predicting they will regard it as 'mad stuff' that bosses once made workers 'travel 100 miles to sit down and use a computer.'
Gen Alpha Has Already Voted
Eighty percent of Gen Alpha — the oldest of whom are currently 16 years old — believe flexible working will be the norm by 2040, according to the IWG-Arup research. Only a quarter of that cohort say they expect to spend more than 30 minutes traveling to work. The majority consider even that threshold too long.
The National Bureau of Economic Research reinforces the trend with harder evidence. An analysis of 8,000 U.S. workers found a clear pattern: as CEOs get younger, the number of days they require staff to be physically present in an office decreases. Leaders in their twenties allow the most remote work. As older executives retire, the researchers concluded, five-day office commutes are likely to retire with them.
The same NBER data found that leaders who embrace remote work are also more likely to adopt new technologies and software-driven management approaches — a correlation Dixon sees as causal, not coincidental.
AI as the Real Forcing Function
'Forget about where people are working,' Dixon told Fortune. 'Most companies will go by the wayside if they don't embrace AI. If you look at winners and losers, the winners are the ones that embrace technology — the whole of the technology, which is flexible work, flexible location, and using technology to get more out of your people.'
Brian O'Kelley, the tech founder who sold AppNexus to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018 before founding Scope3, echoed that view. 'The best companies are going to actually dump their offices to learn to work with non-bodied employees,' O'Kelley told Fortune. 'Anybody who has a back-to-office culture is actually hurting themselves.'
Dixon added that most white-collar work is already online and 'in the cloud,' making the insistence on a fixed physical workspace an artifact of a prior industrial logic rather than a genuine productivity strategy.
The Free-Enterprise Read
For capital allocators and business owners, the trajectory here is straightforward: the firms that treat location flexibility as a compliance headache rather than a competitive lever are pricing themselves out of the best talent markets. Remote-first organizations can recruit globally and operate across time zones — structural advantages that compound over years.
Return-to-office mandates driven by sunk-cost real estate commitments or managerial habit, rather than measured productivity gains, represent a drag on earnings that the market will eventually price in. Free enterprise rewards firms that align incentives with output. If the output is digital and the talent is global, the commute is overhead — and overhead, as any CFO knows, is the first thing a disciplined operator cuts.
