Office owners and employers have spent heavily to turn the beige office into something closer to a five-star hotel. Paul Fairhead, CEO of Infuse Hospitality and former CEO of Guckenheimer, argues that the design work is largely done and the hospitality work is not. In this episode of the Future of Work podcast, host Frank Cottle asks Paul what landlords, employers and flexible workspace operators get right and wrong about food, and why so many corporate cafeterias still sit empty.

Paul, a chef by training with more than 25 years in hotels, restaurants and corporate dining across Europe, Latin America and the U.S., lays out what he calls the food truck approach: small menus, executed well, available only here and only today. He explains why variety now matters more than consistency, how a coworking center with 20 members can borrow the same playbook as a 3,000-person building, and why direct relationships with neighborhood restaurants can beat delivery apps. The two also dig into the harder business questions, including how landlords price amenities into rent, why employees often don't see what their employer spends on a $1 cup of coffee, and how property owners can keep food programs flexible as tenant mixes change. Paul closes with the simplest place to start: coffee.

Frank Cottle sits down with Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow and co-author of Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies, to dig into why so many companies are pouring money into AI and getting almost nothing back. Dave's argument: most companies aren't failing at AI because of the technology — they're failing because they're using it to automate the same broken workflows they already had, instead of rethinking the workflow itself. Frank pushes back with his own company's playbook: rewriting 130 job descriptions from scratch, doubling productivity with the same headcount, and giving guardrails to the people instead of the AI. The two also get into revenue-per-employee at AI-native companies, Ford's very public AI-quality-control stumble, why five generations of workers are adopting AI so differently, and whether "human-in-the-loop" is already outdated thinking.