For me, the office debate is fast becoming a conversation about learning and career development. Two very different institutions sent the same signal this year, and reading them together they make a fairly powerful and intriguing talking point.
JPMorgan brought around 300,000 people back to the office five days a week from March 2025, ending hybrid working across the bank. The reasoning Jamie Dimon has returned to repeatedly is that it's all about the learning: face-to-face work is where collaboration, judgment and apprenticeship happen. Amazon had already moved its corporate staff to five full days from January 2025.
EY's UK head of consulting, Sayeh Ghanbari, is making a related case from the other direction. As AI absorbs more of the routine work, her argument is that what separates one adviser from another is how they present that work, how they handle a client, and the judgment they bring to an ambiguous call. As she put it bluntly: ”building a life centred around working from home is just not the route to success in the world of AI."
Put the two together and the office debate stops being about desks, commutes or control. It becomes a debate about how people learn and the skills you build in a room together. A strong transfer of skills through sitting near people who have done the work before, or who simply think differently, broadens your own perspective in the process. Someone who is detail orientated for example, can gain a lot from working closely with someone who isn't, but who brings other skills worth learning. And the reverse applies just as much. There's room for all of us, and proximity is often the binding ingredient.
To be fair, JPMorgan is currently defying the trend. Around 91% of US financial services firms still offer some form of location flexibility, and the Big Four have mostly held onto hybrid models. I’m not sure where the perfect answer lies but I do know that flexibility needs to remain but office presence and learning when you’re there will hone important skills more quickly.
For anyone building a career in tax transformation, the capabilities that matter most such as advisory judgment, client instinct, the ability to make a call under ambiguity, are exactly what AI can't replicate and exactly what's hardest to learn alone. Podcasts and courses can inform you but they don't necessarily build judgment.
The firms measuring your presence are, in effect, measuring your access to the skills that will remain of critical importance in five years. So the honest question worth sitting with isn't "office or home", it’s ”where is your learning actually happening and is it keeping pace with what AI is changing underneath you?"