The relationship between work and space has for centuries constituted one of the invisible infrastructures of the economy. Physical proximity was not merely a logistical requirement, but an institutional device that enabled coordination, informal learning, social control, and the territorial distribution of value. Artificial intelligence now intervenes in this relationship in a structural manner, accelerating an already ongoing process of separation between value production and the localization of work, to the point of rendering proximity a residual variable in most high cognitive intensity activities.
Cognitive delocalization represents the defining feature of this phase. Unlike previous waves of globalization, based on the physical relocation of productive activities, the widespread adoption of intelligent systems makes it possible to clearly separate the place of execution from the place of decision. Data analysis, design, coordination, and control are carried out within digital infrastructures that operate in real time, independently of territorial context. According to data from the International Labour Organization, more than 35 percent of qualified occupations in OECD countries are today potentially executable in a fully remote mode, a share destined to grow in functions most closely integrated with AI. Economic value no longer follows physical geography, but a topology made of computational access, connectivity, and control over information flows.
This transformation reshapes the organization of work even before altering its content. The workplace loses its function as a shared cognitive space and becomes a temporary interface. Organizations reconfigure themselves as distributed networks, coordinated by intelligent systems that replace many of the functions historically performed by proximity: supervision, synchronization, informal transmission of skills. From the standpoint of efficiency, the system appears more flexible and reactive; from an institutional perspective, more fragile. The reduction of unstructured interactions weakens mechanisms of tacit learning and makes the construction of coherent organizational cultures over time more complex.
The territorial effects of this dynamic emerge with increasing clarity. If high value work no longer requires proximity, territories lose one of their main economic and symbolic functions. Cities and regions that had built their role on the concentration of cognitive skills see the link between population and production weaken. According to analyses from the OECD Regional Outlook, growth in value added in advanced economies tends to concentrate in an increasingly limited number of decision-making nodes, while vast areas remain connected to productive flows only marginally. Work continues to be performed, but the value generated no longer translates into social density, local investment, or the strengthening of territorial institutions.
The new spatial inequalities that derive from this do not follow the traditional distinction between industrial center and periphery. The fracture lies between territories integrated into global cognitive networks and territories that remain excluded from them. It is not geographic distance that determines marginality, but the capacity to access computational infrastructures and AI-governed decision-making processes. Some contexts become fungible, others progressively irrelevant. It is an unstable geography, in which territorial advantage can dissolve rapidly in the absence of a strategy for integration into immaterial value flows.
In this perspective, the thought of Georg Simmel offers an interpretative key that remains highly relevant. Proximity, for Simmel, is not a simple spatial condition, but a form of relationship that structures trust, reciprocity, and a sense of belonging. Distance does not eliminate the bond, but renders it more abstract. Applied to work in the era of artificial intelligence, this insight makes it possible to understand how the loss of proximity does not eliminate productive activity, but transforms its social quality, making it more individualized and less rooted. Work without place is not less intense, but less capable of generating community.
In the corporate world, this transformation imposes a profound revision of governance models. Leading organizations without a recognizable physical center requires an unprecedented capacity to construct meaning and legitimacy at a distance. Decision-making processes, increasingly mediated by intelligent systems, become faster but also more opaque. Human cognitive limits are not overcome, but bypassed, with the risk of losing that interpretative friction which often prevented shortsighted decisions. Managerial responsibility shifts from direct control to the design of decision architectures, a task that requires institutional as well as technical competencies.
The dissolution of work contexts also affects the relationship between individual and organization. In the absence of a shared place, work tends to fragment into sequences of tasks disconnected from a common narrative. Belonging weakens, replaced by functional and reversible relationships. Firms gain flexibility, but struggle to build long-term trust and to retain strategic human capital. Territories, in turn, lose the capacity to transform work into social integration, with effects that emerge over time in the form of relational and institutional impoverishment.
Work without proximity therefore does not represent a simple organizational evolution, but a systemic transformation of the relationship between space, value, and responsibility. Artificial intelligence makes possible a separation that for centuries had been unthinkable, but does not automatically govern its consequences. The territorial inequalities that emerge do not derive from technological scarcity, but from the absence of strategies capable of reconnecting produced value to the contexts that make it possible.
Within this open framework, the issue does not concern a return to forms of proximity that are now obsolete, but the capacity to construct new mechanisms of economic and institutional anchoring. Operating without place does not mean operating without bonds. The trajectory that is taking shape depends on the possibility of imagining forms of coordination, redistribution, and responsibility capable of restoring a collective dimension to work even when physical space no longer performs the function of economic and social glue.
Global AI Observatory