Despite all the technology and innovation reshaping how we work, our workplaces still operate with outdated assumptions. Meeting rooms—once the centerpiece of collaboration—often don’t reflect how people actually meet, focus, and collaborate today. As priorities shift, workplace leaders are focusing less on where work happens and more about productivity and results. When spaces don’t match employee needs, it creates friction that impacts performance. A truly effective workplace starts by supporting the people in it.
With tools like sensors, Wi-Fi data, and badge swipes, facility leaders have more ways than ever to understand how spaces are actually used. By layering AI on top of this data, they can align office design with work policies like hybrid schedules—and quickly identify areas of friction or underutilization. At the second Occupancy Intelligence Summit, a biopharmaceutical workplace leader shared how their team uncovered low usage of traditional conference rooms—and used those insights to reimagine their lobby as a vibrant, high-performing workspace.
AI is transforming workplace strategy by turning time-consuming analysis into real-time insights. What once took months can now be done in minutes, giving leaders the ability to test, iterate, and predict outcomes with speed and confidence. Purpose-built platforms accelerate decision-making, helping organizations optimize space, reduce waste, and deliver better in-office experiences.
While every workforce and office is different, the sixth Occupancy Intelligence Index reveals the patterns behind that variability—turning complexity into clarity. Built from over 200 million square feet of real workplace data across 50 countries, the Index helps facility leaders benchmark their spaces, validate assumptions, and spot emerging trends before they hit. For teams rethinking meeting room strategy, the latest report highlights three key shifts shaping how these spaces are being used today.
Trend: Small meetings are the new norm
Eighty percent of meetings now involve fewer than two people on average, up from 77% in 2024. Yet many meeting rooms are still built for five or more. That mismatch leads to underutilized space, frustration when the “right-sized” rooms are taken, and a less efficient workplace overall. Larger rooms are often used for solo work or quick check-ins—not the collaborative sessions they were built for.
To address this, workplace teams should take action to right-size their room mix—eliminating oversized, underused spaces and replacing them with smaller, high-demand rooms employees actually use. Rebalancing supply with real demand doesn’t just improve the workplace experience—it also reduces wasted space and boosts efficiency.
Surging use midweek
In hybrid workplaces, timing is everything. It’s also one of the biggest space planning challenges for organizations. Room supply might look adequate on paper when averaged across the week, but real-time usage patterns show a crunch—especially on Tuesdays when peak capacity hits 70% for small meeting rooms, compared to just 54% on Mondays and 36% on Fridays. When the demand for meeting rooms surges all at once, it creates bottlenecks that are not reflected in weekly averages.
To meet hybrid needs, space strategies must go beyond room count and align closely with actual usage patterns—especially on peak days. Tools like automatic room release can help maximize availability by quickly putting unused rooms back into circulation after no-shows or meetings that wrap up early.
Booked doesn’t always mean used
Meeting rooms are getting more use overall—with total time usage rising by 3-4% across all room types in the last year. This growth signals that employees are increasingly returning to structured collaboration for heads-down work, hybrid meetings, and in-person touchpoints. But a closer look reveals that while active usage rose, passive usage—when spaces are booked or occupied by objects, but not people—held relatively steady. This suggests that most of the increased use is driven by real, purposeful engagement, but some inefficient use remains.
Opportunities lie in optimizing meeting spaces for efficiency. To truly meet employee needs, workplace strategies must go beyond volume, reclaim underutilized time, and better support how collaboration happens.
The AI office of the future
The last five years have ushered in innovative and groundbreaking changes in the workplace as organizations changed decades-old policies and structures to support new ways of working. AI is revolutionizing the way organizations manage their office environments, providing enhanced in-office experiences and driving productivity—and helping redefine the office layout of the future.
