Spatial Intelligence: The Next Frontier of AI in the Workplace

Over the last decade, AI has learned to understand our words and interpret our pixels. But as Fei-Fei Li recently wrote, the next leap forward for AI isn’t about understanding text or images at all, it’s about understanding worlds. It’s about teaching machines to understand how humans move through space, what we do there, and how the built environment shapes our behavior.

This shift from understanding words → pixels → behavior in space is more than a conceptual evolution. For those of us working in corporate real estate and workplace technology, it’s a signal that the next era of innovation will be spatial. 

At VergeSense, we’ve spent eight years studying human behavior across more than 200 million square feet of offices. What we’ve learned is simple but profound: the future of corporate real estate and workplace will be defined by how people used them, when they used them, and why. 

And to make sense of these patterns of behavior requires a new type of intelligence, one that can predict human behavior in space. As we’re already seeing with the widespread use of LLMs to support us in our day-to-day tasks, spatial intelligence will transform the tools and technologies at the center of real estate planning and management, office design and building automation systems, and finally, touch all aspects of employee experience. 

1. The Future of Real Estate Teams

For decades, corporate real estate technology has sought to measure the number of people across our offices to empower teams to make smarter leasing and space management decisions. We’ve counted badges, desks, sensors, and seats. We’ve analyzed what happened last quarter and made decisions based on the past.

But spatial intelligence will transform real estate planning into a modeling exercise, and the most forward-leaning teams will be asking more of their technology stack to deliver not only historical or real-time insights, but predict human behavior in space.

Instead of asking, “What was our utilization?” teams will be able ask and get instantaneous answers to questions like, “What will happen if our engineering team grows?” or “What if peak attendance shifts?” or “What if we redesign a floor to support different work styles?” This is the shift from static planning to continuous simulation. From space accounting to behavioral forecasting.

Future-ready IWMS platforms must be prepared for a future where they not only display occupancy insights, but also predictive behavior data to empower advanced modeling and simulation capabilities for real estate teams. Spatial intelligence will enable a shift from static planning cycles to continuous, scenario-driven modeling and an always-on planning strategy. 

2. The Future of Office Design & Smart Buildings

Today, offices are still designed through intuition. Architects imagine how space might be used, but the truth doesn’t emerge until months after move-in.

Spatial intelligence changes the sequence. Teams will be able to simulate employee behavior before construction, as design scoring becomes standard practice. They’ll test different layouts, compare performance, and see which variations minimize breakpoints, improve flow, or create the right balance of focus and collaboration. Instead of waiting to respond to complaints, teams will be able to predict when traffic congestion will occur, or which design elements contribute to underutilization or overcrowding. Real estate and workplace teams will be empowered to design and build spaces that understand how people will use them.

And when paired with smart building platforms, buildings themselves will begin to anticipate behavior, optimizing lighting, ventilation, routing, and resources based on predicted occupancy, not real-time scrambling. Operations teams will be one step ahead of the game by being able to proactively configure spaces to support anticipated traffic or high- attendance days.

For design, architecture, and smart-building platforms, prediction won’t be optional anymore. It’s table stakes for the spatial intelligence era.

3. The Future of Employee Experience

The most human impact may be felt at the employee layer. Modern ways of working bring one question front and center for employees: “Will the office work for me today?”

Right now, workplace apps answer in the moment. They show what’s open or full right now. But they can’t tell you what will happen tomorrow.

Spatial intelligence can.

Employees will be able to see which days will be calm or crowded, when focus spaces will be available, and when a team’s presence will create the right energy for collaboration. Experience becomes something the office anticipates, not just reacts to. Employees will be able to check future floor conditions the way commuters check traffic, with “busyness prediction” becoming a key feature. Experience platforms will be able to offer hyper-personalized suggestions, such as the best day to come in for collaboration, or when to arrive to avoid overcrowding, tailored to an employee’s working style and preferences.

In the same way that spatial intelligence will enable autonomous response at the smart building level, experience apps can trigger automatic adjustments at the space layer: adjustments to neighborhood assignments, automatic reservations based on predicted needs, or meeting room reservation rebalancing to support specific room requirements. 

Spatial intelligence enables employee experience apps to become proactive, and will power the next generation of offices that anticipate employee needs, not just respond to them. 

Getting Ready for Spatial Intelligence: A Call to Action for Technology Builders

The future isn’t coming someday, it’s arriving right now. And for real estate and workplace technology teams, the next era of AI will reward those who prepare and leave behind those who don’t.

If you build tools for real estate, workplace experience, or smart buildings, here’s what AI readiness actually requires:

1. Your Data House Must Be in Order

You need always up-to-date, fully integrated digital floor plans, not outdated PDFs from 2018. You need real, accurate occupancy signals across your portfolio, not generic benchmarks or guesswork. Spatial intelligence can’t run on stale inputs. Garbage in means no prediction out.

2. Your AI Can’t Stop at LLMs

Large language models aren’t enough. Spatial intelligence requires models that understand probability, constraints, and physical space. It takes deterministic + probabilistic modeling built on real behavioral data, not text scraped from the internet.

3. Your Teams Need New Skills

The highest-performing real estate teams will shift from spreadsheet archaeology to scenario simulation. Less time cleaning data. More time modeling the future. This is the evolution from “reporting the past” to designing what comes next.

Because ultimately, spatial intelligence isn’t about counting people. It’s about understanding how people behave, and building spaces that support them before they even arrive.

The organizations that prepare for this shift now will define the next decade of workplace technology. The ones that don’t will be playing catch-up.

Looking Ahead

The rise of spatial intelligence marks a turning point for the built environment.

We’ve been working on something exciting, and in the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more about what we’ve been working on at VergeSense  and how it brings this future into the present.

Watch this space.