Over the past five years, the landscape of work has undergone a radical transformation, from deserted offices in 2020 to the integration of AI technologies in 2025. Delving deep into these changes is Colette Stallbaumer, the co-founder of Microsoft WorkLab and the mind behind the book “WorkLab: Five years that shook the business world and sparked an AI-first future.” Stallbaumer, alongside her team at Microsoft, closely examines the evolving nature of work in the digital age.
Colette Stallbaumer holds the position of co-founder of Microsoft WorkLab and serves as the general manager of Microsoft 365 Copilot. She is also the author of the recently released book, WorkLab: Five years that shook the business world and sparked an AI-first future, published under Microsoft’s 8080 Books.
In her book, Stallbaumer articulates how the past five years, commencing with the global pandemic, have ushered in a continuous wave of change in the work environment, with the integration of AI at its core. She emphasizes that this transformation is ongoing and predicts further significant shifts in the coming years.
“Change is the only constant—shifting norms that once took decades to unfold now materialize in months or weeks,” she writes. “As we look to the next five years, it’s nearly impossible to imagine how much more work will change.”
Listen below for our conversation, recorded on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify, and continue reading for key insights from the conversation.
The ‘Hollywood model’ of teams: “What we’re seeing is this movement in teams, where we’ll stand up a small squad of people who bring their own domain expertise, but also have AI added into the mix. They come together just like you would to produce a film. A group of people comes together to produce a blockbuster, and then you disperse and go back to your day job.”
The concept of the ‘frontier firm’: “They’re not adding AI as an ingredient. AI is the business model. It’s the core. And these frontier firms can have a small number of people using AI in this way, generating a pretty high run rate. So it’s a whole new way to think about shipping, creating, and innovating.”
The fallacy of ‘AI strategy’: “The idea that you just need to have an ‘AI strategy’ is a bit of a fallacy. Really, you kind of 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 great areas to actually think about putting AI to work for you.”
Adapting to AI: “You have to build the habit and build the muscle to work in this new way and have that moment of, ‘Oh, wait, I don’t actually need to do this.’ “
The biggest risk related to AI: “The biggest risk is not AI in and of itself. It’s that people won‛t evolve fast enough with AI. It’s the human risk and ability to actually start to really use these new tools and build the habit.”
Human creativity and AI: “It still takes that spark and that seed of creativity. And then when you combine it with these new tools, that’s where I have a lot of hope and optimism for what people are going to be able to do and invent in the future.”
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
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