Cushman Just Quantified It. AI Is Going To Add 330 Million Square Feet Of CRE Demand. The Room Mix Inside Those Buildings Already Flipped
Cushman & Wakefield dropped a report this month that should end the "AI is going to gut office demand" trade for good. Their analysis says AI will add 330 million square feet of net new CRE demand in the US over the next ten years. Industrial picks up the biggest piece at 298.5 million. Office gets 24.4 million. Multifamily and retail round out the rest. Their chief economist Kevin Thorpe put it as plainly as you can: "AI is an additive to real estate demand."
That's the macro answer. The job-loss trade is wrong. Office is growing.
JLL has the deal-level read. AI tenants signed roughly 415,000 square feet in Manhattan in Q1 2026 alone, about half their total for all of 2025. Average deal size has more than doubled year over year. The number that matters most: AI firms are leasing space about 60% larger than their current headcount. They're not signing for the team they have. They're signing for the team they're about to hire.
That's a healthy office market. Tenants underwriting their own growth.
Now look inside the buildings. That's where it gets interesting.
What's Happening
We track resource bookings every day across our portfolio. Compare the last 30 days to the prior 30 days, same buildings, same tenants. Here's the shape of demand right now.
Conference Hubs (the flex huddle rooms that scale from a handful of people up to a midsize working group) up about 117%.
Outdoor space up 158%. Roof decks up 40%. Spring helps, but the trend started before the warm weather.
Classroom and training space up 65%. Mother Rooms up 67%. Lounges and quiet space up double digits. Conference rooms in aggregate up roughly 17% to 24%.
And on the other side:
Co-working space down 67%.
Recreation game rooms down 29%.
The market is back. The room mix has flipped.
Why It Matters
For five years the office story has been a quantity story. How much space gets leased. How much vacancy. What the absorption number prints. Cushman's report just moved that conversation forward by a decade. AI is additive. The macro trade is settled.
The trade that's still open is shape.
AI-augmented teams need different rooms than the teams of 2019 did. They run smaller, ship faster, and rotate between deep work and high-density collaboration in the same afternoon. The room that fits that pattern is the Conference Hub. Flex walls. Scales from 4 to 14. Books from a phone. Our data shows demand for those rooms more than doubled in 30 days. Standard conference rooms grew too, but at roughly one-fifth that pace.
The 2019 amenity stack is shrinking. Game rooms down. Co-working space down hard. Those rooms got built for a workforce that doesn't exist in 2026. The AI firm taking 60% more space than its headcount isn't going to fill the overhang with a foosball table.
Leesman has been measuring this from the experience side for over a decade across more than 1M workplace responses. The buildings that score highest aren't the ones with the longest amenity list. They're the ones where the layout matches how teams actually work this year. Learning space. Outdoor breakout. Flexible huddle. That mix wins. The shuffleboard table doesn't.
What to Do
Three moves for any landlord underwriting space this year.
First, retire your 2019 floor plans. The amenity arms race is over. The configuration race is on. AI tenants are taking 60% more space than they need today. If that overhang sits in 2019-shaped rooms, your tenants are renewing into space they don't actually use. That's your 2029 churn risk hiding in a 2026 lease signing.
Second, instrument the bookings. The portfolio average lies. A modest bump in total reservations can hide the fact that classroom and training space exploded and co-working collapsed. Pull the trend by room type every month. Make the mix shift visible.
Third, get the front door right. AI-native tenants are mobile-first. If their team can't find and book a Conference Hub on a phone, they'll skip your building and grab day-passes at a flex provider down the street. The right configuration doesn't matter if discovery is broken.
Cushman just put a number on it. AI is going to add 330 million square feet of CRE demand to the US market.
The buildings that catch that demand are the ones already configured for the AI room mix. The ones still selling 2019 amenity stacks are about to find out what happens when a tenant signs a 5-year lease for space they don't actually use.
Anyways. The macro is settled. The micro is wide open.