AI redesigns jobs, not cuts them, says JLL study, yet region faces a significant skills gap challenge as the primary barrier to transformation
Despite concerns of AI-driven job losses, a new study from JLL (NYSE: JLL) finds that a majority of senior business leaders across Asia Pacific expect their workforces to grow (61%), even as the region simultaneously contends with the world’s most acute AI talent shortage.
The data reveals a striking regional paradox: Asia Pacific leads the world in AI adoption across technology management (52%), portfolio optimisation (51%) and CRE strategy development (47%), yet faces the steepest capability gap in finding the talent needed to sustain that progress.
JLL’s 2026 Future of Work Survey, conducted from January to April 2026, captures the key priorities, challenges and strategies of over 2,200 C-suite and CRE leaders across 21 countries. The 2026 survey found that despite 78% of respondents expecting AI to drive significant changes to their real estate portfolio strategy, only 31% are actively preparing to redesign spaces for human-AI collaboration and just 15% have reached the optimising stage of AI adoption. The gap between what organisations believe and what they are doing defines the central challenge of the moment and it is being driven by critical tensions in terms of execution decisions, capabilities and budget constraints.
An Execution Barrier
While AI is generally expected to augment human roles according to JLL’s survey, most organizations are still examining the impact on performance, which leaves them in early stages of adoption. A small pool of respondents (15%) is in the optimization phase, moving beyond the pilot and scaling phases to actively prepare for the redesign of roles and places of work. However, the majority are in the monitoring and analysis stages, with 46% focused on tracking AI trends and 40% analyzing potential impacts on their CRE function. These CRE leaders are depending on workforce decisions to define their organisations’ space transformations, creating a holding pattern that prevents forward progress.
“Across Asia Pacific, we’re beginning to see a divergence emerge between the organisations moving into AI optimisation and the much larger group still monitoring and analysing from the sidelines,”
said Susheel Koul, Chief Executive Officer, Real Estate Management Services (REMS), APAC at JLL.
“What’s notable is that the companies pulling ahead aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets; they’re the ones building adaptive capability and treating AI as a growth enabler, not just a cost lever. Left unaddressed, that gap has the potential to compound quickly, which is why closing the skills and capability gap now matters more than ever.”
The Capability Concern
This capability challenge extends directly into the talent pipeline. Globally, skills gaps in AI, analytics and emerging technologies are cited as the top barrier to CRE value creation by 36% of respondents, surpassing budget constraints as the primary impediment for the first time in 15 years of this research. In Asia Pacific, this challenge is measurably more severe: 42% of APAC respondents identify the AI skills gap as their primary constraint, the highest rate globally, with nearly half of APAC organisations (49%) expecting talent scarcity driven by AI reskilling demands to define their workforce landscape over the next three to five years – again the highest proportion of any region. Limited change management expertise (26%), organisational silos (25%) and measurement challenges (23%) further compound the problem.
The scale of this capability deficit is especially striking when set against APAC’s heightened AI ambition. The region leads the world in deploying AI across the most strategically consequential CRE functions yet finds itself most exposed to the talent shortage that threatens to constrain that progress.
This creates a “technology dilemma” that reflects the vulnerabilities of an increasingly connected and AI-driven business environment. Organisations must invest in advanced technology to achieve productivity goals – now cited by 46% of C-suite respondents as a core CRE KPI, displacing traditional cost-based metrics. However, three of the top four portfolio risks are technology-related – including cybersecurity and data privacy (47%), technology/AI disruption (41%) and uncertainty around AI’s impact on space (40%), with News release economic volatility and budget pressures (43%) being the other top concerns. In Asia Pacific, concern about technology and AI disruption runs higher still: 44% of APAC respondents identify it as a leading portfolio risk – the highest rate of any region – reflecting both how central technology has become to the region’s real estate strategy, and how acutely exposed its leaders feel to the risks that come with it. These risks carry additional dimensions across Asia Pacific, where data sovereignty regulations are tightening and geopolitical considerations are increasingly embedded in location strategy.
“There is a widespread assumption that AI will reduce the need for physical workplaces, yet our research tells the opposite story,”
said Kamya Miglani, Head of Research, Real Estate Management Services (REMS), APAC at JLL.
“The organisations furthest along in their AI journey are doubling down on their physical environments because they understand that the higher-value, more cognitively demanding work that AI enables requires spaces that help people think, focus, and connect at their best, and that technology and workspace experience should not be competing priorities; together, they form the foundation for sustained cognitive performance.”
Affordability Over Aspiration
As the CRE mandate evolves from cost management to capability enablement, organisations are reorienting their investment priorities accordingly. Critical infrastructure such as advanced technology and AI support (46%) and reliable technology infrastructure (44%) are the top strategies for achieving employee productivity, surpassing physical space elements like adaptable spaces (31%) or wellbeing amenities (24%).
In Asia Pacific, where 39% of organisations require full five-day office attendance – a higher proportion than any other region globally – the pressure to ensure that physical workplaces actively deliver on the productivity expectations placed upon them is both immediate and intensifying. Yet globally, leaders simultaneously cite the costs of executing these preferences as top concerns: AI-driven workforce automation (39%), technology infrastructure requirements (32%) and energy escalation (44%).
This contradiction reveals three strategies for reconciling transformation ambitions with cost realities:
- Operational Optimisation in markets or assets facing multiple constraints that will make transformation slow and uneven regardless of aspiration. When unavoidable costs materialise – rental rate increases, energy escalation, opex/CAM increases – organisations will cut discretionary investments despite stated preferences.
- Strategic Outsourcing when organisations recognise the gap between aspirations and internal capabilities – and choose to maintain strategic control while outsourcing execution. In Asia Pacific, where 42% of organisations identify the AI skills gap as their primary constraint – the highest proportion of any region globally – this approach is an increasingly pragmatic route to bridging capability gaps without surrendering strategic direction.
- Capability Building for the leading organisations that will systematically resolve constraints before pursuing transformation. These organisations invest in upskilling, build change management capability, develop measurement tools, and strengthen cross-functional collaboration. They accept that some capability investment may prove misaligned with eventual enterprise strategy but create adaptive capacity for the future.