Why 2026 Feels Odd

I keep noticing something.
We are having many parallel conversations about the future - AI, offices, global talent, cities, productivity - and each one is coherent on its own terms. Yet when you hold them side by side, they create a strange cognitive dissonance. The world feels both more connected and more fragmented; more productive and less stable; more technologically capable and less socially confident.
When the present feels like this, I’ve learned to look for structural changes that sit underneath the headlines. Often, they aren’t dramatic. They’re quietly administrative. They arrive as “operating model”, “capability”, “platform”, “centre of excellence”. And then, ten years later, we wonder how the ground moved beneath us without anyone quite noticing.
One of those signals is the Global Capability Centre. The GCC.

The GCC as a Clue
“A GCC in India” can sound like an old story: globalisation, cost arbitrage, offshoring. Factory logic applied to desks.

But the centres being built now, especially at the scale that global banks and technology-heavy firms are committing to, are something else in practice. They are places where organisations build and maintain the machinery of modern knowledge work: engineering, data platforms, cybersecurity, analytics, internal tooling, increasingly AI operations. In some firms, the GCC is where the organisation’s technical confidence accumulates over time.

What matters here is not a dramatic wave of redundancies in the West. The mechanism is subtler. It’s about where future growth lands. It’s about the next thousands of roles - early career ladders, mid-career capability compounding, leadership pipelines - forming somewhere else.

That is a different kind of shift than we are used to discussing. It alters not just payrolls, but influence, learning, and where “the organisation” increasingly feels itself to be.

A familiar historical rhyme, with a different shape

If you grew up watching manufacturing migrate, the analogy is tempting. Factories moved; supply chains reorganised; politics followed, a decade late and badly phrased.

Knowledge work doesn’t migrate with the same visibility. There’s no factory gate to close, no town to photograph, no single date to point to. The language is smoother. The transition arrives as “global delivery”, “follow-the-sun”, “platform teams”, “shared services”. It can feel benign right up until the moment you notice the ladder has thinned.

And in the background, there is an unsettling political irony: manufacturing becomes a cultural battleground at the same time as high-value cognitive work becomes increasingly footloose. Nations talk; firms reorganise. These are different rhythms.

So why build huge offices in London?
Here’s the part that initially feels contradictory.

On one hand: enormous GCCs. On the other: huge commitments to prime office space in global cities. You might reasonably ask: if knowledge work can be distributed, why are organisations still writing very large cheques for very large buildings?

JP Morgan exemplifies this seeming paradox: building, via Brookfield, a 2 million square foot GCC in India (Asia’s largest) and a new 3 million square foot HQ in London.

I think the answer is that “office” is splitting into two distinct roles, and we have been slow to update the mental model.

Some work is increasingly treated as scalable production: build platforms, run systems, maintain models, improve workflows, keep the organisation operating. This can be concentrated where talent is deep, teams are stable, and execution can run at industrial scale. In a GCC.

Another kind of work is harder to industrialise: the work of commitment. The work of deciding. The work of arbitration when trade-offs are real, when risk is asymmetric, when reputation and legitimacy matter. Client relationships sit here. Regulatory accountability sits here. Leadership sits here. When something breaks, it’s not just the system that needs to recover; it’s trust.

London (and other top tier cities) remain valuable because they concentrate this second category. Not because everyone needs to be there every day to “do work” in the old sense.

AI changes what being together is for

AI makes this even more interesting.

Yes, AI enables asynchronous work. It lowers the cost of coordination across time zones and reduces the friction of documentation, handover, and context reconstruction.

But it also changes the bottleneck. When execution becomes cheaper, alignment becomes more expensive. When options multiply, judgement becomes scarcer. When systems become more capable, misalignment becomes more dangerous.

So the reason to be together shifts. It becomes less about sitting at a desk to complete tasks and more about calibrating shared understanding: framing problems, setting constraints, making trade-offs explicit, deciding what to delegate to machines, and agreeing what “good” looks like.

That is why I’ve long felt the office paradox: technology reduces the need to be in the office to execute work, yet increases the value of the office for the most human parts of work - co-creation, negotiation, trust-building, commitment.

Not five days a week. But regularly. Rhythmically. Intentionally.

A further twist: GCCs and AI are entangled

There is one more turn of the screw.

Many GCCs are, by design, places where work is standardised and systematised. That is what makes them scalable. It is also what makes them legible to automation. AI doesn’t just arrive as a tool used within a GCC; it arrives as a force that compresses parts of what the GCC was built to do.

This suggests a trajectory that’s less linear than the headlines imply: growth, then consolidation; expansion, then compression; large teams building systems, followed by smaller teams orchestrating them.

Which, again, has consequences for real estate. It changes not only where offices are needed, but what kind of offices make sense, and for how long.

Why this matters for commercial real estate

If you put these pieces together, it helps explain why the office market feels so difficult to read. We keep reaching for single-cause explanations - hybrid work, rates, supply, amenity - and they all matter. But underneath them is something deeper: organisations are learning how to scale capability without scaling domestic space in the way we once assumed.

That doesn’t mean “offices are over”. It means demand is becoming more selective and more functional. Some buildings and locations become more valuable because they support high-stakes human coordination. Others struggle because they were designed for a world where the office was primarily a container for execution.

That world is receding.

Where I’m going with this

This is the first note of 2026 because I suspect this is one of the most under-discussed structural shifts shaping work and cities right now.

In the next pieces, I want to do three things:

1. Look at GCCs as operating-model infrastructure, and what their scale tells us about where organisational intelligence is being built.

2. Explore the emerging split between execution and judgement, and what that implies for offices, portfolios, and city-centres.

3. Ask the deeper question beneath it all: participation. Who gets to be part of value creation as the machinery of cognition reorganises globally?

For now, one question to leave you with:

If the office is becoming less a place of work, and more a place where organisations make commitments - what should we stop building, and what should we build instead?