A conversation between Gordon Lamphere, J.D. of Van Vlissingen and Co. and Elatia Abate, a workplace strategist and futurist who has led talent acquisition and HR for global brands including Anheuser-Busch InBev, The Wall Street Journal, and Dow Jones. Transcript edited for clarity.
Elatia Abate: The biggest risk is not understanding that the rules of the game have changed. Even if you’re a business that is cash-flush, successful, doing really well right now, if you haven’t understood these outside dynamics, you have an expiration date. The rules of the game are available to everybody, but the faster you can get that the game has changed, the rules are different, and shift is happening, the faster you can get your business on board.
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to the Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast we’ll be speaking with Elatia Abate, a workplace strategist and futurist who has handled talent acquisition and HR for some of the globe’s largest brands, including Anheuser-Busch InBev, The Wall Street Journal, and Dow Jones. On the podcast, we dive into the rules of business and how they’re changing faster than most leaders realize. Elatia breaks down AI’s exponential technological shifts and the workforce dynamics that are radically changing, rewriting how companies operate now and how they should plan for the future. Elatia, thank you so much for hopping on today.
Elatia Abate: I am thrilled to be here and can’t wait to dive in.
Gordon Lamphere: Before we start, what got you into the world of work and what got you interested in how people get things done?
Elatia Abate: I had a more traditional corporate career. I ran global recruiting for Anheuser-Busch InBev and for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. Throughout my executive career, a thread that’s pulled forward into the last decade I’ve spent as a futurist at the intersection of the future of work, strategy, and leadership, is always this question: how might we empower people’s success in the face of great uncertainty and disruption? As my futurist career began to take off, that question became not just interesting or a life mission, but globally critical.
Gordon Lamphere: Understanding AI is pretty critical today. What do you see in terms of some of the biggest changes and biggest dangers of exponential change?
Elatia Abate: It’s useful to take a few steps back. When I first began my research around the futures of work, strategy, and leadership, one of the things I started to do was dive into what I call paradigm shifts. If we can understand the rules of the game and the world as it existed before, and then learn that there are new rules of the game, we can compare the two and align our businesses, our impact, everything we’re doing, with the world that’s coming and unfolding. Most of us were taught to think about business and creating value in a world that is incremental. But the velocity of change, this is from assembly-line times, has increased from centuries to seasons to seconds. If you’re thinking with an incremental, centuries kind of mindset in a world operating at a seconds kind of velocity, that’s the biggest risk that every business in the world faces, regardless of the technology. AI, by the way, is one of many technologies hitting an inflection point of exponential change. The biggest risk is not understanding that the rules of the game have changed. Even if you’re a business that is cash-flush, successful, doing really well right now, if you haven’t understood these outside dynamics, you have an expiration date.
Gordon Lamphere: What do you think those rules are in terms of how folks are operating now and what potential paths for success could be going forward?
Elatia Abate: I like to think about this through a tool I’ve developed. I call it a strategic kaleidoscope. When you look through a kaleidoscope, it’s the same pieces of glass, but every time you click it to the right or left, you get a new vision. There are three strategic questions. If the velocity of change has shifted from centuries to seasons to seconds, we’ve moved from a world that was linear to exponential, and I’d argue we’re in a world that’s already quantum. The first question, the linear question we all know, is: what can we logically do with what we’ve already done, what we already know? This is the data-driven question, where we create the future by pushing forward from the past. In an exponential world, the question becomes: given that we’re here, free of constraint to the past, what is it that we want to create? That gives you a future-focused question; you design what you want to build and then pull that future into the present. But when the velocity of change is instantaneous, the question becomes: right now, in this very moment, what is emerging? What’s emerging from the market, from our clients, from the world in general? Like when Einstein came onto the scene, gravity didn’t go away, but our understanding of it expanded. When you’re thinking about strategy, you’re not going to throw the data out the window, it’s still critically important, but you augment that past-driven question with these other two lenses and build a strategy that’s much more robust and able to interact with the world we’re living in now.
Gordon Lamphere: The world we’re living in now is wild. Even for me, someone who grew up at the start of the internet transition, what’s particularly interesting is that who’s being most affected by AI is very different than what we were taught in 2012 when I was leaving university. What are you seeing in terms of how it’s affecting the white-collar workforce, and are the factory-floor mechanization waves of the past a good way of looking at it, or is it something totally different?
Elatia Abate: It is analogous in some ways, and you hit the nail on the head. In the past, we were taught to believe that white-collar work would be protected. While things might be happening in the blue-collar world, if you went to university, got a degree, and began a white-collar career, you’d have career stability, especially in the United States, for now and forever. That is probably the largest critical difference: in the past, white-collar work would be relatively, not always, but relatively untouched, and that is not the case now. If you want to draw the analogy to assembly-line times, during industrial revolutions the assembly line comes online, and it’s human beings using tools to build stuff. Since Henry Ford, robotics and other technologies have advanced, and now if you walk onto almost any factory floor, it’s human beings guiding robots to build basically the same things. What’s different about this, and the data and research call it many things, a productivity revolution, an energetic shift, is that the parallel thing is happening in knowledge work. I call it a stackable factory. When you think about a skyscraper or an office building, up until now human beings have used SaaS and other software tools to do their knowledge work, and now it’s going to be machine intelligence guided by human ingenuity. That’s a similar modularization and simplification of jobs. The data’s bearing this out; Amazon just let go of a whole bunch of people, 4,000-plus, because AI is able to do many of the tasks human beings did up until now. I’m optimistic about what we can create, but in the meantime, the disruption in the markets is going to be pretty intense.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve been fascinated to see how it’s affected our own clients. I have one client, a software company, that’s been letting go a huge portion of their marketing team; they said they need one or two marketers where they originally needed fifteen or twenty. I asked, are you doing the same for your software team? And they said, actually no, we’re hiring more software engineers, because we’re so much better at doing things quickly, we’ve created whole new product lines. For every business it seems completely different based on the models. One thing you’ve written about is the idea of stackable humans and how AI affects multi-skilled operators very differently than junior roles. How should we see this playing out for careers depending on where individuals are on their trajectory?
Elatia Abate: It’s all centered in that concept of the stackable factory: how does skyscraper office life shift, both in work process and impact, but also in the roles and the people sitting in the building? The thinking is twofold. One, where and how is AI going to make our business processes, go-to-markets, and revenue generation more efficient, and how does that compress roles? And two, where is AI going to help us expand and grow opportunity? So it’s at once a risk-mitigation, squeezing-water-out-of-the-stone thing and an opportunity-creation, how-might-we-build-a-whole-new-mountain conversation. Where we’re seeing the greatest impact in general is around mid-manager roles, the ones many organizations have always complained about, if you’ve seen the movie Office Space. And this is a big difference: many entry-level roles, because they’re relatively automatable given today’s technology. You don’t need a million analysts doing Excel spreadsheets when AI can calculate it really well; you need one person making sure the math is right. Those are the two big places where we’re seeing shift. For the moment, and I’ll underline for the moment, executive leadership, strategic thinking, real-time analysis, and organizational building are still humans. What I’d provoke a listener to consider is what happens if these things we hold so precious as our human capabilities are actually not where our focus could be best employed.
Gordon Lamphere: We had another futurist on, highly involved in robotics and AI, and the oddest thing he said was that the robots we’re using now are incredible at delivering things and complex processes and thinking, but they suck at picking things up. We need people to physically pick things up, but the robots can handle the complex processes. It changes the calculus so much from what we were taught twenty years ago, when I’d have assumed the robot picks the thing up and the human comes up with strategies for factory improvement. So where does that leave us, and how can a company, and potentially a real estate investor, start planning for 2030 or 2035 when the future seems so uncertain?
Elatia Abate: The critical capability is being able to name, define, and challenge the assumptions you have about how your business works, how your market flows, and what your clients are up to. It doesn’t mean you’ll get it right, but if you become more adept at defining your assumptions, you can see where the impact is going to hit and come up with a broader range of scenarios. So do that first. Secondly, the game can become a game of opposites. What happens in a world where everything stays exactly the same, which I don’t think will happen? How do we project the business out? And the flip side: what if every assumption we have is a hundred percent incorrect? What does that extreme look like? In between, you’ll have the truth where it eventually lands, but your ability to examine both ends of that spectrum gives you the meat you need for strategic planning. Especially folks in your space, you have a twofold opportunity: how is AI impacting the business we’re running, and how can our knowledge about this help support our clients through their own transition? You could wait to see how AI is impacting other businesses, but if you want to get ahead of the curve, you can meet at that intersection and provide value around space design, around how humans interact with technology, around employment trends and everything else swirling around that.
Gordon Lamphere: One trend we’ve seen for us and businesses we work with is junior-level individuals having their jobs replaced or significantly reduced. For us, that’s the earliest thing we saw: people who’d have had a significant role as an intern, their basic data analysis and basic property management accounting functions were replaced very quickly over the last eighteen months. Who ends up filling the shoes of the higher-ups in this future world when we don’t have young property managers or young real estate agents?
Elatia Abate: Here you’ve hit upon the strategic conundrum for organizations that are continuing to grow. For now it’s okay if you don’t have junior employees filling a pipeline for future leadership, because perhaps folks in your company are young enough and you’ve got enough of a bench. But there’s an expiration date to that. This might be one of those places where we shift how we think about hiring younger folks and what we invite them to do as more junior people, how we envelop and channel their expertise around technology, having grown up as digital natives and soon as AI natives, to help shape our policies. But still have them learning together with the more experienced folks, so that when the founder retires or your CMO leaves, you do have a pipeline of talent, just not shaped in such a siloed, lockstep fashion as in the past. It might be a loss leader to bring in folks and invest in them, using their expertise in slightly different ways, but to ensure your pipeline is full.
Gordon Lamphere: Another pipeline issue over the last ten years has been offshoring, and now this weird near-shoring and reshoring trend, playing out very differently across industries. We’ve seen it accelerate with AI, as fewer back-office folks are needed, and many businesses that were doing a tremendous amount of offshoring, particularly to Latin America and India for skilled work, are now just using AI. Do you think that’s going to substantially influence trends across the US, or am I just sitting in my bubble of clients?
Elatia Abate: I think it’s a both-and conversation. As the future of work has unfolded over the last decade-plus, one great advantage is that the planet becomes your talent pool, so both for job seekers and employers, you’ve got so many more talented people to choose from, and especially for a first entry into a global marketplace, a really dedicated workforce. But then, as you look at who’s actually doing the work and the AI intervention, especially at AI and technology companies at scale, many offshoring initiatives have existed to train AI models. Once the training is theoretically done, those jobs are no longer needed, so it’s a pretty severe cutoff. There’s a really interesting book called “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao, a journalist, that focuses on OpenAI but highlights a global trend: large AI labs go into global-south countries, ask people to help train their data, and then when they reach some threshold, they leave. Those are the kinds of trends we’re going to see. I believe it’s highly doubtful these are jobs that will be replaced onshore in the US in any way; once a model is trained, theoretically those jobs aren’t needed.
Gordon Lamphere: Most people listening who have a job would like to keep it, or at least have a job in the future. How do we look at the future so we can be empowered by AI and not structurally displaced by it? Is there a way to find ourselves more augmented, like Iron Man, versus replaced by the Terminator?
Elatia Abate: This is one of the wonderful things I love about the world unfolding. In the past, economists would tell you you’ve got two choices: you’re either going to be replaced or enabled, either you’re screwed or you’re going to be okay. That feels so fatalistic. The more grounded and realistic way to explore this is through something I call the REACH framework. Yes, some jobs will be Replaced; we’re already seeing that. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s a normal flow during an industrial revolution: new technology comes in, some jobs are lost, productivity dips for a minute, but over time everybody gets back on the train. Many jobs will be Enabled, like the cardiac surgeon who, thanks to AI, can look into your heart and see exactly the plaque that’s there, so you know if you need open-heart surgery; that’s life-changing. Jobs will be Created; back in 2022 there were only nineteen chief AI officer jobs on Glassdoor, and now there are almost two thousand, and that’s one job title. And if you shift your thinking even more, it’s a Human empowerment technology. What happens when we don’t have to do mundane tasks all the time, how might that unleash our creativity, and as AI combines with robotics, what happens when we don’t need to send human beings into life-endangering jobs anymore? So it’s much more nuanced than either you’re okay or it’s all over. The question becomes, how might I transform my role to keep me out at the edge of the growing and changing technology and economy?
Gordon Lamphere: What skills do you think are defensible, and where should I be training? Should I be the next Anthony Bourdain and have taste? Should I be a leader like Jocko Willink? Who’s going to have a defensible moat against AI?
Elatia Abate: This happens in stages; there’s where we’ll land at some point in the future, and what’s happening in the interim, because we’re not going to wake up tomorrow with everything changed. Hands down, though, if I had kids, or as a person figuring out what I want to do, the first thing is something I call regenerative resilience. The dynamics of change have shifted. In the past, disruption would happen, we’d be disoriented for a while, then come back to some form of stasis. Now there’s no returning to normal; the world we’re living in is stacks on stacks on stacks of disruption. While Harvard Business Review and McKinsey and Psychology Today would say resilience is a thing, resilience is actually exhausting; it’s feel-the-fear-and-do-it-anyway, and it’s cool if you jump out of a pool once, but if you have to do it for years on end, you’ll burn yourself out. So regenerative resilience is how we take the dynamics of disruption and channel them into our ability to thrive as human beings, grow businesses, and create better community and society, walking a path from chaos to clarity, from fear to fearlessness, and from isolation to connection. That psychological, embodied training of how to thrive in disruption, to become the ever-evolving eye of the storm, is hands down the most important thing. Secondly, critical thinking, how we name, define, and challenge our assumptions. And on technical skills, if you haven’t started using AI, dive in today, use any tool. If you’re running a team, many members are terrified they’re going to lose their jobs, so play the game together: how might we use AI to put ourselves entirely out of business, and how might we hundred-X our business in the next eighteen months? Same tools, same idea of extremes, and somewhere in the middle the truth will land.
Gordon Lamphere: For us AI has dramatically reduced the back-office staff we need, but at the same time front-office staff might have to increase because we’re doing more deals. There’s that interesting paradox. And we’ve mentioned the bottom of career ladders disappearing, but at the same time we’re in this weird world where in our office we’ve had five generations in the workforce. You have somebody talking about the Second World War and somebody talking about Tate McRae at the water cooler. How do we operate in this AI world where we have five generations in the workforce and people with varying skill sets, some stronger users of AI than others?
Elatia Abate: There’s a lot of power inside curiosity. If you take that same kaleidoscope analogy, and by the way, five is probably the smallest number of generations we’re going to have in the workplace going forward, because thanks to advances in longevity science, lifespans are going out to 100, 120 years old. What happens when retirement isn’t 65 or 75, but 95? Totally different ball game. So how do you create an environment where the benefit of each kind of expertise gets to shine? Here’s an experiment for folks in the office. Say you have a common challenge, grow the business by X, or a problem with client Y. Design a brainstorming session one of two ways: either pair the most junior people with the most senior people to debate and create one solution together, or have each generation do their own problem-solving and then present it in a Shark-Tank-esque pitch. This way you’re bridging gaps of understanding, seeing where some generations or kinds of experience are more fruitful and where they might not be, without saying “you’re good at this, you’re bad at this.” You’re saying, this is a problem we’re trying to solve, here are the qualities of the solutions, which are better. That fosters stronger collaboration, because whatever decision you take, everyone’s participated, so you’ve got buy-in even if their idea wasn’t picked, and you begin to break down some of these walls.
The reality of five generations sharing one office, and what it means for how and where companies take space, is exactly what we mapped for the Chicago market in Five Generations, Five Submarkets: How to Pick Chicago Office Space in 2026.
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s go into our Final Four. What’s one topic the real estate industry should be talking more about that we haven’t covered today?
Elatia Abate: It’s going to happen faster than you think, because the economics of AI adoption are making more sense than other kinds of technologies. So if you’re on the fence or don’t think this is a thing, don’t think that anymore. Get yourself ready, and more importantly, get ready to usher your clients into the world that’s unfolding.
That “faster than you think” AI adoption curve, and its building-level consequences for office demand, is a throughline in our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q2 2026.
Gordon Lamphere: What’s the world going to look like ten years from now?
Elatia Abate: We are going to have, I believe, conscious AI. Not just artificial general intelligence, but artificial superintelligence and artificial superconsciousness. By the time we reach ten years from now, this is going to be combined with robotics; humanoid robots will have the dexterity and other capabilities. So the psychological shift of who’s around, who’s paying attention, how ubiquitous technology is, who our friends and family, in air quotes, are, I believe the game will have totally shifted.
Gordon Lamphere: What advice would you give to yourself when you were leaving college and just starting off in the workforce?
Elatia Abate: First, no one knows what they’re doing, and there is no one right way to proceed. There is no right answer; there are infinite right answers. So the most important thing is to get into action and to try. And if a door opens for you, say yes, especially early in your career, because ninety-nine percent of the time you can go back, but you never know if that door is going to swing open again.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s great advice. Definitely nobody knows what they’re doing; I can paraphrase Socrates and say that. The whole point of the podcast is to bring in men and women who are in the arena and get connections to bring on next. Who would be the one person we should bring on next?
Elatia Abate: There’s a wonderful woman named Nancy Giordano, who is also a futurist and thinks about these things in a slightly different way than I do, but could add a lot of value to the conversation.
Gordon Lamphere: If someone’s interested in reaching out to you, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Elatia Abate: The social media place where I play the most is LinkedIn, by far. And you can find me at my website, which is my first and last name, elatiaabate.com, and my email is the same. That’s where you find me.
Gordon Lamphere: Thank you so much for hopping on today. We really appreciate it, and we have to have you on in the future.
Elatia Abate: Thanks so much for having me, I appreciate it.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Elatia. We appreciate her insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us get quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. Whether you own, manage, or invest in office and workplace property, or you are rethinking how your team uses space, across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q2 2026.