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. New evidence from a global survey reveals the shift in plain numbers. GoTo and Workplace Intelligence surveyed 2,500 people across various roles and countries about AI and work in 2025, and over half believe AI will eventually render physical offices obsolete. A similar share prefers AI-enhanced remote work over being in the office, and strong majorities believe AI boosts balance, anywhere productivity and remote customer service.
Leaders do not need another debate about where people sit. They need a practical way to unlock performance across distributed teams. Empowering employees to build their own AI tools delivers that path. It gives people the flexibility to work where they are most effective while standardizing quality and speed through shared automations, not shared ceilings.
Empower employee builders to close the flexibility-productivity gap
Employee demand for AI is mainstream and driven from the bottom up. 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.
The GoTo findings add a flexible-work lens. 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 that organizations should prioritize AI at least as much as amenities, reinforcing that flexibility is about enabling rather than offering office perks.
Empowerment is not just access to a chatbot. It is the ability for an accountant, a customer success manager or a field engineer to build and refine the AI that runs within their workflow. Modern low-code platforms now make this practical at scale. Microsoft’s Copilot Studio, for example, provides security and governance controls that enable admins and makers to create and monitor agents that automate tasks and access enterprise data under policy. Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Studio offers low-code AI builders for CRM, so admins can embed actions, prompts and models into workflows without a heavy engineering lift. These platforms are designed so 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.
Flexible work endures when people customize their tools
The debate about the death or rebirth of the office misses a more stable signal. Hybrid work has entered a durable equilibrium across many economies. A 2025 working paper on global persistence reveals that the average number of work-from-home days stabilized after 2022, with notable cross-country variation but consistent 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 revealed a 14% average increase in productivity, with the largest gains observed among less experienced workers. These findings align with what practitioners report when employees can tailor assistants to specific tasks. AI automates low-value tasks, standardizes quality and frees up 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 tasks to AI and use saved time for higher-impact activities. That is the blueprint for flexible work that lasts, because it converts preference into performance. It also reduces friction between locations by standardizing the how of work rather than the where.
Governance turns citizen developers into an advantage
Empowerment without structure invites risk. Structure without empowerment invites shadow IT. The solution is to formalize employee-built AI as a governed practice. The good news is that the tooling and guidance exist to make this practical. Copilot Studio publishes prescriptive governance best practices for agent creation, data access and monitoring. Microsoft has also outlined autonomous agent capabilities that extend copilots into multi-step workflows, which makes governance even more important. ServiceNow offers program design accelerators and a citizen development governance guide that help leaders set standards for intake, approvals and life cycle management. These resources make it feasible to open the gates while keeping the guardrails.
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 arrives fully formed. They appear when teams map their work and build targeted assistants that remove the drag of repetitive steps. That is why the GoTo research matters for leaders today. It shows that employees want AI, expect flexibility and are ready to put new tools to work. The missing piece in many companies is permission and support to build, not just to use.
Leaders can put this into motion now. Treat AI creation as part of the employee experience. Shift a share of the budget from perks to enablement, just as workers recommend in the 2025 survey. Train teams in prompt design and safe data use. Stand up a lightweight review process so staff can publish assistants to a shared gallery. Use platform analytics to monitor usage and outcomes. Celebrate wins publicly so maker behavior becomes culture. The result is a flexible operating model that compounds. As platform capabilities expand, including recent enterprise agent features, your people will absorb improvements immediately because the builders are the operators.
Flexible work is not a temporary concession; it is a permanent change. It is the operating model of a global economy that rewards adaptability, speed and customer focus. The evidence is consistent. Employees want AI and support a greater investment in it. Hybrid arrangements persist across countries. Productivity increases when AI automates routine tasks and when people can tailor tools to their specific job roles. The through line is empowerment. 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.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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