New Future of Work Report 2025
- Jenna Butler ,
- Sonia Jaffe ,
- Rebecca Janssen ,
- Nancy Baym ,
- Jake Hofman ,
- Brent Hecht ,
- Sean Rintel ,
- Bahar Sarrafzadeh ,
- Abigail Sellen ,
- Mihaela Vorvoreanu ,
- Jaime Teevan ,
- Mohammed Alsobay ,
- Liz Ankrah ,
- Stephanie Beers ,
- Megan Benzing ,
- Mia Bruch ,
- Zana Buçinca ,
- Mar Carpanelli ,
- Amelia Cole ,
- Scott Counts ,
- Madeleine Daepp ,
- Justin Edwards ,
- Alex Farach ,
- Daniel G. Goldstein ,
- Mary L. Gray ,
- Javier Hernandez ,
- Eric Horvitz ,
- Nicole Immorlica ,
- Kori Inkpen ,
- Shamsi Iqbal ,
- Manasa Jagadeesh ,
- Siân Lindley ,
- Brendan Lucier ,
- Mercy Muchai ,
- Ambrita Nand ,
- Alexandra Olteanu ,
- Jacki O'Neill ,
- Max Peterschmidt ,
- Christian Poelitz ,
- Rabeeza ,
- Nathalie Henry Riche ,
- Advait Sarkar ,
- Sunayana Sitaram ,
- Amanda Snellinger ,
- Jina Suh ,
- John Tang ,
- Lev Tankelevitch ,
- Kiran Tomlinson ,
- Anne Trapasso ,
- Adam D. Troy ,
- Gaurav Verma ,
- Jack Williams ,
- Ben Zorn ,
- Jordana Young
MSR-TR-2025-58 |
Published by Microsoft
Note from Chief Scientist and editor Jaime Teevan:
As you sit down to read the 2025 New Future of Work report, it’s worth pausing to consider the thread that ties the past five years of reports together. The inaugural New Future of Work report (opens in new tab), published in 2021, focused on new ways people could work without relying on colocation as a key productivity tool. The second, in 2022 (opens in new tab), centered on the reintroduction of physical offices and the emergence of hybrid work. In 2023 (opens in new tab), we explored how large language models could reshape everyday work, and, in 2024 (opens in new tab), how those advances moved from promise to real‑world impact.
Each year, as I’ve written this introduction, I’ve found myself saying that the previous year marked a once-in-a-lifetime generational shift. But after five years, it’s clear that the reports aren’t capturing a series of separate revolutions. Rather, they are chapters in a single story of the digital evolution of collaboration, each representing a phase that builds on, and is enabled by, what came before.
Last year’s report highlighted research showing that AI delivers substantial gains in individual productivity. The next frontier, covered in this year’s report, is collective productivity: how teams, organizations, and communities can get better together. AI can bridge gaps of time, distance, and scale, but only if built correctly. We must design AI to support shared goals, group context, and the norms of collaboration, and this requires not just new tools but new ways of working.
Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more remains a stable north star as the terrain shifts. If the past five years taught us anything, it’s that the future of work is not something that happens to us, it’s something we create together, as a research community, as an industry, and as a public. As always, we invite you to join that effort, approaching it with curiosity, intentionality, and guided by evidence, so the next chapter of work is better for everyone.
Editors: Jenna Butler (Principal Applied Research Scientist), Sonia Jaffe (Principal Researcher), Rebecca Janßen (Senior Applied Scientist), Nancy Baym (Partner Research Manager), Brent Hecht (Partner Director of Applied Research), Jake Hofman (Senior Principal Researcher), Sean Rintel (Principal Research Sciences Manager), Bahar Sarrafzadeh (Principal Applied Research Scientist), Abigail Sellen (Distinguished Scientist), Mihaela Vorvoreanu (Principal Applied Scientist), Jaime Teevan (Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow).
For more information on Microsoft’s New Future of Work Initiative, see aka.ms/nfw (opens in new tab)