By Lisa Woodall
A decade or so ago, the shape of a successful organisation was physical.
Headquarters in prime locations. Retail parks filled with customers. Meeting rooms booked weeks in advance.
The property portfolio was the pride of the annual report. It showed pictures of the offices and people in them. It demonstrated scale, stability, and ambition.
Today, the picture looks very different. The hum of servers has replaced the chatter of open-plan offices. Fewer people are commuting in, but more machines are powering up. Balance sheets are lighter on square footage and heavier on compute power.
We’re starting to trade office blocks for data blocks and that shift tells us something profound about where value now lives, and where culture may follow.
The infrastructure of intelligence
AI has triggered a race few predicted not for talent or ideas, but for processing capacity.
I’d love to ask ChatGPT how many new data centre parks have been built around the globe in the last five years? But I don’t think I need to waste time asking that .. I think we can intuitively tell that data centres are booming.
After all, every model, every agent, every co-pilot needs a home. And that home isn’t in a city centre. It’s in a data centre, probably on the outskirts of town, near an energy source, quietly drawing more power each year than some major cities and small countries.
Corporate real estate teams once managed office space and floor plans. It won’t be long before investment committees will be reviewing compute capacity and the expense of the cloud architecture.
Have you ever thought that every new data centre is more than an IT investment. It’s a cultural signal. It says speed and scale matter. It says data is our new foundation.
I’m sure someone somewhere coined the phrase – Where the money goes, the mindset follows. If no one else has then maybe I should!
The digital twin economy
Alongside this physical shift from offices to data centres, something less visible but equally powerful is taking shape.
Businesses are starting to build digital twins not just of assets and supply chains, but of themselves. Architects are designing entire operating models mirrored in code.
AI agents are entering as copilots, helping teams see patterns, spot risks, and make decisions faster. It sounds like augmentation, but it’s also migration, work moving from human-led to the hybrid human-and-machine.
Today’s copilots will be tomorrow’s colleagues. Over time, they’ll take on more of the repetitive, predictable, and data-heavy work, hopefully freeing people for the creative, judgment-based, and relational.
But as organisations model themselves in code, a new question emerges: what kind of culture are we encoding?
Every algorithm carries assumptions. Every twin reflects a truth or a bias. Scaling these truth and biases and letting them loose will have intended and unintended consequences. The culture you model today in your business will be the culture you magnify tomorrow.
The changing geography of work
Meanwhile, we all know the human geography of work continues to shift.
Since COVID, we log in from homes, hubs, and shared spaces. The monday – Friday rhythm of office life has been replaced by the quiet intensity of distributed work with some of us heading into the city only twice a week.
Paradoxically, as people spread out, data centres are clustering closer together. They’ve become the new business parks.
If you’ve ever visited a data centre, you would have seen rows and rows of servers, lots of wires and little lights flashing on and off. The person showing you round would have been proud of the fact the main lights go out when you left the floor. And the people less data centres would have been a proud achievement for the IT team.
Work is moving from commercial offices to commercial compute. From retail parks to server parks. From high-street presence to high-speed performance.
And in the process, established investment portfolios and the cultures they reflect are being rewritten.
Where capital flows, culture follows
Have you ever thought about investment strategies and how every investment may tell a story about what we believe creates value.
When we built offices, we invested in presence a place for people to turn up and get things done. When we built retail parks, we invested in experience, a place for people to be inspired to spend. Now, as we build data centres, we’re investing in intelligence, compute power for people to prompt and provide.
None of those choices are wrong but each brings a cultural consequence. Office culture, shopping culture and now prompt culture.
If capital moves from places where people gather to systems that process prompts, is there an unintended consequences for belonging?
If budgets shift from connection to computation, what happens to creativity and original thought?
We talk a lot about digital transformation, but what we’re also seeing is capital transformation and culture will follow wherever the capital and value flows.
The next frontier of value
The industrial age was built on land. The digital age was built on networks. The intelligent age, the one unfolding now, is being built on data and prompts.
As organisations remodel themselves as digital twins and workforce compositions blur between human and AI, we’re entering a new era of choice.
What we choose to fund, build, and scale next will define the character of our enterprises for years to come. There will be unintended consequences. Maybe not for those in charge, making the investment decisions and benefiting from the computer power but for those that used to be the computing power of the office block that proceeded it, the people.
This next era of business transformation one that’s migrating intelligence from people to servers is changing who we as nations and society will become. It will dictate where value is created, how we all get to contribute to that value creation and who benefits from the value it’s creating.
I can’t help but think as I watch this new world unfold and the demise of the commercial office block and the rise of the people less data centres that something else is needed to drive a positive culture and provide purpose for those less in control of the investment decisions.
Remember … Where capital flows, culture follows. Choose how we invest and who we invest for wisely.
Lisa Woodall is the author of Whatever Next? — a practical, human guide to making transformation more honest and more likely to stick. Drawing on lived experience in architecture, transformation, and design, she explores how organisations can reconnect strategy, systems, and people to make change that lasts.