Are you old enough to remember the raucous old days? I don't know about other sectors, but it was very noticeable in newsrooms because they were particularly loud.
The need for collaboration between and across teams kept noise-deadening fabric dividers to a height where they were useful for keeping piles of paper from spilling onto neighbouring desks without ever approaching proper cubicle height.
There was a peak where everyone had a cellphone, calls to mobile were cheap, and everyone was on the phone seemingly all the time.
It was loud.
Silence fell in stages. The introduction of SMS killed one type of call, e-mail going mobile killed many more. By the time WhatsApp reached effectively 100% penetration, phone calls were all but unheard of. When in-house IM tools such as Slack became ubiquitous, even the intra-office conversation disappeared.
We should have known it was too glorious to last.
Just as the cubicle walls were slow to fall, it is going to take a while for office designers to let go of the idea that voice conversations take place in meeting rooms and casual watercooler-type spaces specifically created to encourage them. The lost technology of white noise generators, and the idea that people need to be divided by tall pot plants, will be recovered eventually.
In the meanwhile, though, AI is going to make it loud all over again.
I have colleagues who prefer the tap-to-send method you see in the likes of Anthropic's Claude voice mode on the mobile app, and I get it. Some people always scorn focus and productivity and are happy to achieve less.
For me, it took only one taste of the sweet, sweet nectar of not even having to take my fingers off the keyboard when I need a synonym, or want to look up when WhatsApp overtook Mxit. So, I have the Sol persona of OpenAI's voice mode sitting in its own browser tab, ready to act as my external brain as soon as I speak.
Not everyone works in the same way, and goodness knows I've made the wrong call about the way certain technologies will go often enough. But we can bet on averages here.
Silence fell in stages. The introduction of SMS killed one type of call, e-mail going mobile killed many more.
People in an office setting are almost always knowledge workers, and knowledge workers almost always benefit from having simple but powerful tools immediately available. Whether it is the electronic equivalent of a thesaurus or a slide rule, or retrieving code snippets, most people will do better when they can have a conversation with a smart assistant without a significant break in flow.
From there on out we know how it goes. Employees will use voice-first LLM at home, and will expect to use it at work. Some workplaces will ban outside tools on security grounds, or ban AI conversations as disruptive on the shop floor, but it will just take them a bit longer to bow to the inevitable.
Managers who weren't around in the loud days will think mandatory headphones are the answer until they learn again that overhearing one side of a conversation is worse than being subjected to both sides.
And, in the fullness of time, office design will catch up and make provision for everyone at every desk having a conversation all the time.
But that won't happen nearly as vast as voice discrimination improves, allowing conversations with bots and agents regardless of how bad the background noise gets. Nor as fast as retrieval and analysis times on LLMs will improve, making voice interaction seamless.
During that disruptive phase we're going to need some old-school ideas. I'm thinking sound baffles, quiet hours, clustering for users with particular needs – and the reintroduction of an officer class who get enclosed offices.
The startup-chic affectation of having the CEO sit at a desk on the open-plan floor is all fine and well until you calculate how much you pay that CEO, and thus how much it costs to deny the CEO the productivity boost of unfettered voice-mode AI use.
We'll also have to deal with the resentment about yet another change in physical space and infrastructure necessitated by technology, with the pro-tech types – that would be you and me – acting as lightning rods for it.
That's okay, though, this time I'm okay with the cabling people and the office manager getting all huffy with me. This time I've got Sol to talk me through how to deal with them.
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