CBRE Analysis: AI's Growth a Net Positive for the U.S. Office Market

The growth of artificial intelligence stands to change the mix of U.S. jobs, not necessarily eliminate a significant amount of them, according to a new report from CBRE.

CBRE’s analysis, as applied to research by AI-industry experts, found that only 5% of U.S. office-using jobs are highly vulnerable to disruption by AI. Another 18% are highly adaptable to AI and thus likely to endure or even thrive. The remaining 77% are in the middle ground of being exposed to change but not significant disruption.

Another factor that bodes well for the office market: The jobs that AI is likely to displace, like payroll and timekeeping clerks and tax collectors and revenue agents, are largely focused on individual work, which is often done remotely. By contrast, the jobs that AI supports, like financial and investment analysts, computer network architects and AI engineers, tend to focus on collaborative work often done in the office.

“History has shown that technological advancements often lead to more jobs rather than fewer,” said John Morris, CBRE’s Group President of Advisory Leasing. “After the advent of both the Internet and the smartphone, office-using jobs made large gains in share of overall U.S. jobs. Our analysis indicates that the upside of AI for the office market is greater than the downside.”

CBRE’s baseline forecast for U.S. office vacancy factors in modest net U.S. job growth over the next five years due in part to AI. In that scenario, vacancy would decline to 14.5% in 2031 from 18.3% this year. This baseline forecast, which CBRE bases on more moderate job-growth assumptions than in past eras of technological advancement, factors in an improving job market, strong performance of prime, best-of-the-best office space, improving occupier sentiment and minimal new construction.

Even if such a forecast proves optimistic, in a downside scenario, the effects of AI disruption would only marginally worsen office vacancy compared with current levels.

In calculating AI vulnerability of the office market, CBRE applied a job-vulnerability index created by AI-industry researchers Sam Manning and Tomás Aguirre to a range of office-job classifications.

Other economic measures support the theory of long-term job growth from AI. New business applications in the U.S. have risen from just over 400,000 per year at ChatGPT’s launch in 2022 to over 500,000 in 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Meanwhile, CBRE forecasts that the office-using workforce will grow at an annual rate of 0.9% over the next five years, partly due to hiring by AI companies. That’s in comparison to the 0.6% annual growth rate of the broader U.S. job market.

“Job growth supported by the expansion of the AI sector means that available prime office space will be tougher to come by in the years ahead,” said Mike Watts, CBRE Americas President of Office Investor Leasing. “When there are no large blocks of available space in prime, best-of-the-best buildings in a given market, that’s when the next tier of office buildings below prime likely will attract spillover demand from relocating occupiers.”