The corporate real estate (CRE) landscape has reached an inflection point. After years of reactive rightsizing and pandemic-driven pivots, 2026 marks the year when real estate redefines its role from a necessary cost into a strategic differentiator. While 72% of organizations prioritize cost reduction, future-focused companies are leveraging efficiencies to invest in technology, experience and flexibility to unlock competitive advantages that transcend simple expense management. The industry faces accelerating change, requiring CRE leaders not only to react to trends, but also to proactively manage change, develop adaptable talent and foster stronger business integration.

The speed of change in 2026 introduces a new leadership mandate: sustainable endurance. Technology adoption cycles are now moving faster than human learning curves, creating pressure, burnout and capability gaps across CRE teams. Winning organizations will not only identify the right strategies but build the cultural and talent foundations to absorb change continuously. In this context, proactive change management, adaptive organizational design and stronger business-CRE integration become essential. Here’s what successful CRE leaders need to know, and do, to gain advantage in 2026. 

Definition: A mature, data-driven workplace model that connects flexible work patterns, experience strategies and location factors for improved employee outcomes of performance and wellbeing.

The Reality: Employees broadly understand current attendance frameworks - 66% say their employer has a clear policy and 72% view it positively. But understanding doesn’t equal showing up. Support and compliance rise when the workplace feels worth the commute; resistance correlates with poor comfort, limited autonomy and weak wellbeing support. Put simply: people don’t reject the office-they reject bad office experiences and poor locations. 

Flexibility, in terms of location and working hours, has become a human need, not a perk. Work-life balance now outranks salary as the top retention driver (65%), and 57% say flexible hours would improve quality of life. This means the office must adapt to better support this new orchestration of work and life.

Meanwhile, experience itself is becoming more important as a lever to drive performance and is central to talent attraction and retention strategies. With burnout affecting 40% of workers globally and ‘always on’ challenges mounting, employers recognize that an effective workplace experience can directly impact productivity and mental wellbeing. Employers are challenged with needing to support flexibility while also addressing the hidden burden of hybrid work: the pressure for constant availability across physical and digital realms.

With more days in the office and work-life balance top of mind, the workplace’s location also becomes more vital for the employee experience. Globally, 67% of people value a workplace in a vibrant location, and this figure is highest in India (84%), the Middle East (78% KSA, 76% UAE) and China (77%). In geographies with rapidly expanding urban hubs and longer commute times, employees are keen to enhance the value of their working day.

Definition: The integration of advanced artificial intelligence into building systems and workplace platforms, creating responsive environments that adapt to real-time data and user needs. This connected approach enables automated operations, predictive maintenance and optimized space and energy management, supporting seamless experiences, enhanced efficiency and smarter decision-making across the organization.

The Reality: AI exploration has exploded - from under 5% of CRE teams planning pilots in 2023 to 92% in 2025 - yet most are still in the experimental phase. The bottleneck isn’t ambition, it’s foundational, with 54% citing compatibility issues with legacy infrastructure as the top barrier. Despite this, several workplace technologies have surpassed an 80% adoption rate, including tools for predictive management and maintenance, data warehousing for CRE data and energy and emissions management platforms, showing that operational efficiency is swiftly emerging as the most impactful area for AI investment. 

In facilities management specifically, 28% have actively embedded AI solutions, with work order management (57%) and asset life cycle insights (54%) leading investment priorities. These aren’t moonshot projects—they’re practical applications delivering measurable ROI through automated performance tracking, predictive maintenance and operational optimization. 

Why It Matters Now: Sensor networks, access control, Wi-Fi analytics and booking systems now provide rich data streams for AI to act on. However, sorting and organizing this fragmented information remains a major challenge—and is widely seen as the top use case for AI in commercial real estate today. Energy and maintenance are among the largest controllable OPEX items: AI can cut costs 10%-30% through predictive controls. AI tools can support landlords and occupiers seeking operational resilience amid labor shortages in facilities and property management, but these require foundational data structures and upskilling of existing staff. Employees ranked on-site concierges as one of the top preferences to support in-office attendance, and AI assistants could improve employee experience (finding teammates, booking the right space, surfacing meeting alternatives) and reduce friction, supporting hybrid adoption within cost-restrained environments. 

2026 Call to Action: Address the fundamentals that will unlock AI’s full value for CRE by focusing on both your talent’s skills and your organization’s data infrastructure. Rethink how CRE partners with IT, HR, finance and core business functions, leveraging joint expertise and shared data to solve high-impact problems and maximize value across the organization. Prioritize strengthening your data architecture - ensuring interoperability, quality and governance - before scaling AI initiatives. Map future success by defining meaningful metrics, identifying the data required and building systems to track and share it across functions.

Launch pilots that address proven use cases, such as work order optimization, energy management and space analytics - where 61% of organizations are already realizing significant impact. Invest in change management and skills development to foster widespread adoption and innovation, transforming CRE and allied functions into collaborative, future-ready partners.

Definition: A mature, data-driven sustainability strategy that integrates continuous energy tracking, real-time monitoring and advanced analytics to optimize usage, control costs and meet evolving compliance standards. Smart metering, IoT sensors and AI-powered insights enable organizations to maximize cost savings, support decarbonization goals and enhance resilience across the portfolio.

The Reality: A growing share of real estate stock faces functional, locational and regulatory obsolescence that threatens both compliance and asset values. For CRE leaders, these risks are also critical in the face of energy cost increases, which have accelerated in the last four years, ranging from 20% in India to more than 50% in the UK. Energy performance was ranked a top sustainability driver (62%). Higher costs, combined with tightening regulation and ongoing operational pressures, make robust energy management an urgent business priority. However, many organizations still lack comprehensive mechanisms to track, measure and optimize utility consumption on a recurring basis. Data silos, outdated systems and lack of real-time performance insights hinder efforts to achieve - let alone sustain - energy savings at scale. Developing strong processes and platforms for energy data integration is now foundational.

Effective energy management tracking not only unlocks direct cost savings but also provides the credible data required for compliance, risk mitigation and future investment cases. High-quality energy data even empowers further business cases for decarbonization, proving that sustainability and utility cost reduction go hand in hand.

Why It Matters Now: Regulations are tightening globally through building performance standards, disclosure mandates and embodied carbon limits, creating penalties and asset devaluation risks for laggards. Asia Pacific and EMEA lead the way, as our recent client survey shows 44% of organizations in Asia Pacific and 49% in EMEA have publicly committed to net zero emissions, compared to 33% in the Americas. However, 62% in the Americas say energy performance is the biggest driver for achieving sustainability goals. Smart building technology and AI now enable measurable savings and verifiable reporting, converting sustainability from cost center to ROI engine by improving energy efficiency and reducing waste. And 59% of occupiers report significant cost savings from retrofit projects, with 55% seeing enhanced asset values and 43% noting improved employee productivity as additional value creation. 

2026 Call to Action: Invest in state-of-the-art energy monitoring, metering and analytics platforms as a strategic business imperative, not just a compliance checkbox. Ensure that energy data is fully integrated into operational dashboards and decision-making frameworks at all levels of the organization. Set clear, transparent targets for utility cost savings, and embed these into capital allocation, vendor negotiations and retrofitting plans. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, where the pursuit of utility reductions is integrated with broader financial and environmental objectives.

These trends aren’t independent - they’re interconnected elements of a strategic transformation. At the center is the recognition that high-quality, integrated data is the foundation and connective tissue of effective change in CRE. Leaders should elevate investment in data infrastructure - not as a cost to be justified individually but as a vital platform that enables rapid adaptation, experimentation and talent transformation. Business value from AI, energy management and portfolio agility all depend on this commitment. The common foundation is high-quality, integrated data that elevates CRE as a true C-suite partner. The organizations that master this integration - linking cost optimization with employee experience, AI capabilities with human-centric design and strategic partnerships with operational excellence - won’t just manage real estate costs. They’ll transform their physical footprint into a platform for competitive advantage, talent attraction and business resilience.