From empty offices in 2020 to AI colleagues in 2025, the way we work has been completely reinvented over the past five years. Our guest on this week’s GeekWire podcast takes a closer look at these changes with his colleagues at Microsoft
Colette Stallbaumer Co-founder of Microsoft WorkLab, General Manager of Microsoft 365 Copilot and author of the new book, Worklab: Five years that shook the business world and gave birth to an AI-first futurefrom Microsoft’s 8080 Book.
As Stallbaumer explains in the book, the five-year period from the pandemic and continuing into the current era of AI represents a continuous shift in the way we work, and it’s far from over.
“Change is the only constant—changing rules that once took decades to unfold now materialize in months or weeks,” he wrote. “As we look ahead to the next five years, it’s almost impossible to imagine how many more jobs will change.”
Listen below to our conversation recorded at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify and read on for key insights from the conversation.
‘Hollywood Model’ of Teams: “What we’re seeing is this movement between teams, where we’ll have a small squad of people who bring their own domain expertise, but also add AI to the mix. They come together just like you would to make a movie. A group of people come together to make a blockbuster, and then you disperse and go back to your day-to-day work.”
Concept of ‘Frontier Farm’: “They’re not adding AI as a component. AI is the business model. It’s the core. And in these frontier firms with a small number of people using AI, it creates a pretty high run rate. So it’s a whole new way of thinking about shipping, manufacturing and innovation.”
Fallacy of ‘AI Strategy’: “The idea that you just have to have an ‘AI strategy’ is a little bit wrong. Really, you want to start with the business problem and then apply AI. … Where are you spending the most and where do you have the biggest challenges? Those are really great areas to think about putting AI to work for you.”
Adapting to AI: “You have to build habits and build muscles to work in this new way and have that moment of, ‘Oh, wait, I don’t really need to do this.’ “
Biggest risks related to AI: “The biggest risk isn’t AI in and of itself. It’s that humans won’t evolve fast enough with AI. It’s the risk and the ability of humans to really use these new tools and develop habits.”
Human creativity and AI: “It still takes that spark and seed of creativity. And then when you combine that with these new tools, I have a lot of hope and optimism for what people are going to be able to do and innovate in the future.”
Audio editing by Kurt Milton.
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