Artificial intelligence is poised to change the composition of U.S. office work more than it is to erase a large share of those jobs, according to a CBRE Research report published this month.
CBRE’s analysis, which applied occupational scores from researchers Sam Manning and Tomás Aguirre to office-using industries, found that only 5% of the office-using workforce is highly vulnerable to AI displacement. Another 18% is highly adaptive and positioned to use the technology to expand output. The remaining 77% sits in between: exposed to change but not necessarily to wholesale replacement.
The more immediate constraint on office employment is demographic, the report said. An aging workforce is producing about 83,000 retirements a month, while immigration has slowed. Private-sector layoffs remain near their lowest rate since 2013. In that environment, CBRE forecasts office-using employment to grow 0.9% a year over the next five years, faster than the 0.6% pace projected for the broader economy.
History offers a parallel. After the internet and the smartphone arrived–technologies that also sparked fears of white-collar job loss–office-using roles captured their largest gains in share of total U.S. employment since at least 1990. Office-using industries already generate more than twice the national average output per worker. AI-driven productivity is expected to push labor further toward those sectors, CBRE said.
The jobs most at risk of automation tend to be routine, measurable and already performed remotely. Roles that AI is more likely to amplify–complex, judgment-heavy and collaborative–skew toward in-person work. That mix, the firm argues, is a net tailwind for office demand rather than a headwind. Fully remote positions, about 13% of the U.S. workforce, have shown higher layoff rates; space occupied per office worker has risen since generative AI tools became widely available in 2023 even as headcount was roughly flat.
New business formation has also accelerated. Weekly applications rose from just over 400,000 around ChatGPT’s late-2022 launch to more than 500,000 in 2025, Census Bureau data show–consistent with the Jevons Paradox, in which cheaper, faster services expand total demand.
CBRE’s baseline outlook incorporates modest job growth, stronger demand for scarce prime space, improving occupier sentiment and a thin construction pipeline. Under that scenario, the U.S. office vacancy rate falls to 14.5% by year-end 2031 from 18.3% now. A theoretical downside case that assumes every highly vulnerable office job disappears and none is replaced would lift vacancy only to 18.7% by 2031.
Markets with highly educated, adaptable workforces face the least risk. San Jose and San Francisco rank as the least vulnerable large metros by share of occupied office space exposed to disruption, followed by Washington, D.C., Seattle and Boston. Within financial services–an industry with a relatively high national vulnerability score–the most resilient concentrations are in New York, San Jose, Charlotte, San Francisco, Boston and Salt Lake City.
Tech occupiers already illustrate the pattern. They accounted for 21% of U.S. office leasing in the first half of 2026, matching a record share, with nearly two-thirds of that activity in the San Francisco Bay Area and Manhattan. Average lease terms for the largest tech users have lengthened.
“History has shown that technological advancements often lead to more jobs rather than fewer,” said John Morris, CBRE’s group president of advisory leasing. “After the advent of both the Internet and the smartphone, office-using jobs made large gains in share of overall U.S. jobs. Our analysis indicates that the upside of AI for the office market is greater than the downside.”
Mike Watts, CBRE Americas president of office investor leasing, said AI-related hiring will tighten the best buildings first. “When there are no large blocks of available space in prime, best-of-the-best buildings in a given market, that’s when the next tier of office buildings below prime likely will attract spillover demand from relocating occupiers.”
The result, CBRE concluded, is an acceleration of the market’s K-shaped recovery: stronger rent growth for high-quality space that serves the most productive workers, and faster obsolescence for secondary assets whose main function is simply housing desks.
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