The end of remote work

Arturo Martínez Díaz — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:56 +0000

Before 2019 and COVID, working from home (as we know it today) was something quite unique. Only a few companies, with rare exceptions, had remote work policies that allowed employees to enjoy their homes and better balance their work and family lives.

In fact, the trend at that time was for more and more companies to adopt these types of policies in "hybrid" models.

COVID-19, the disruptor

The global pandemic forced many companies to send their employees home, and suddenly, the world understood that, with almost complete certainty, 99% of office work could be done from home without "serious" consequences.

It's true that some companies were better prepared than others, and that, obviously, some jobs still had to be done on-site.

Remote work was here to stay.

Back to the Office: A Real Estate Shift

When we emerged from the pandemic, many companies maintained their remote work policies for quite some time, and then some side effects began to appear:

What happened to all the investment in office real estate?
Would the trades and jobs dependent on office centers be affected? (for example: bars, restaurants, transportation, etc.)

And suddenly, overnight, companies around the world that had never had any problems with remote work began to backtrack.

Some have speculated that this forced return to the office was a way to get employees to leave the companies. My general theory is that it simply stems from the fact that, generally speaking, too much money is invested, directly and indirectly, in keeping office centers alive and running in major cities.

The bar next to your office, the coffee shop where you stop to buy breakfast on your way to work, the taxi/Uber you take because you're running late, public transportation, real estate companies, office design firms, office supply companies... A large part of the overall economy could disappear if office workers disappeared.

So, in recent years, we've seen a trend in job postings toward hybrid models (2/3, 3/2, 4/1) where companies require you to go to the office and "allow" you to work from home (as if it were a gift and not a necessity).

They argue that this way they can properly maintain the synergies that only occur in person... and preserve time and space so we can balance our lives.

Real Remote Work

I've been working remotely nonstop for almost eight (8) long years for different companies. I've worked from the mountains, the beach, or the park next to my house.

The "synergies" of office work were replaced by emails, video conferences, or chats on apps like Slack or Teams.

These companies truly understood what remote work meant and what it offered their employees, and they put a lot of effort into reducing the productivity and socialization gaps that arose from everyone being scattered around the world.

Dear employer, if you're reading this, what you call "office synergy" but is really just a conversation by the coffee machine only creates knowledge silos. An email copying all interested people would have been enough.

AI Disruption: A New Era

With the arrival of AI and its various applications, we can clearly see a new world emerging where #programming will soon cease to be an #art and most office jobs will be reduced to keeping agents constantly busy.

We will be bosses of machines, earning minimum wage...

But I wonder:

What will happen to those strategic and highly restricted sectors?
How will companies in these areas be able to coexist with AI and remote work?

I'm referring to cyber-security companies, cyber defense firms, the military, law enforcement, critical social services, specific and important teams within large companies such as banks, and even government agencies.

Many of these companies or teams will be prohibited from using publicly available AI.

I believe these companies simply won't be able to maintain remote work policies. It will be the end of this work model in these specific sectors, areas or teams.

Is this the end? Yes.

There will be no other option. Let's be clear: you can't have 100% control over what your employee does when working from home, or even where they actually work.

Even if you prohibit the use of AIs, the employee will somehow find a way around that prohibition when they're not in a completely controlled environment.

Therefore, companies will have to adopt one of these options:

Trust
Provide your employee with all the necessary devices and networks to ensure that no information reaches the AI.
Host your own AI models and agents on specific services accessible only through previously configured devices.
Keep the employee in a completely controlled environment with no outside access.

Trustness can be broke at any time; providing any employee with a large setup of devices and even specific networks can be problematic and will require high costs; hosting a "custom" AI is something not all companies will be able to afford.

Let's be honest, any employer will go with option number 4, because it's the least expensive of all the options. And not only the cheapest, but also the one with the most guarantees.

And what is a 100% controlled environment? The office.

There, I can have computers connected to a network where I can filter and block access to different IP ranges and domains. I can have devices that block cameras and smartphones. I can require that digital and electronic devices must be kept out of the office. In reality, it's the only place with a high degree of certainty that information leaks will be prevented (because 100% prevention is impossible).

What do you think?

Will the AI bring us a future where some of us will be laying at home instructing a machine somewhere else around the world, meanwhile some others will be forced to go into office every single day due to the lack of security of using AIs?

Or will be all of us eventually required to go back to offices?