CBRE hires future-of-work expert Dean to lead building experience lab

Dallas, TX CBRE has hired future-of-work expert Annie Dean to lead a newly formed CBRE x Industrious Building Experience Lab. The lab will aim to transform offices, logistics centers, storefronts, and other commercial settings – the buildings that power the global economy – into more human-focused, empowering and delightful places to work.

Dean also will serve as global chief strategy officer for CBRE’s building operations & experience business segment. The role will allow the lab to not only serve as an intellectual and creative center for the future of work, but also enable insights and products developed in the lab to be implemented in partnership across the CBRE platform, the largest portfolio of real estate and facilities in the world, totaling nearly 8 billion s/f. 

The lab’s focus on applied innovation resulting in real-world products, rather than abstract research, will be further bolstered by its close collaboration with CBRE’s flexible workplace provider, Industrious, led by Anna Levine, and CBRE’s workplace strategy consulting practice, led by Lenny Beaudoin, enabling the lab’s insights to rapidly benefit CBRE clients.

“How we work has fundamentally changed,” Dean said. “Businesses collaborate through technology, which has never been more true in the age of AI. When everything is virtual, the real world matters more than ever. And as a result, the world is ready for a different kind of workplace experience.

“We need to turn workplace functions from a cost-center, shared-services mentality into a strategic business unit that delivers ROI and shifts from space utilization into a user-centered mentality and processes that look like product development cycles. Data is at the center of this opportunity.”

In her career, Dean has led workplace experience and flexible work efforts at companies including teamwork-management software developer Atlassian, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and her own startup for advising on flexible work, Werk.co. Since 2022, she has led Atlassian’s real estate and workplace experience divisions and oversaw a teamwork lab researching modern work trends, including the influence of artificial intelligence. She started her career as a commercial real estate attorney at Wall Street law firms.

Though a majority of companies (61%) now report their office attendance rates have reached a steady state, another 38% still expect attendance to increase further, according to CBRE’s new 2025 Americas Office Occupier Sentiment Survey of 184 office-using companies.

The survey also found that their employees’ workplace experience is a top consideration for companies when deciding whether to relocate to new offices or to stay put by renewing their leases.

“CBRE runs more workplaces than anyone else on earth,” said Jamie Hodari, CEO of CBRE’s building operations & experience segment. “That’s a privilege, but it’s also a responsibility. Increasingly, our clients want to make their workplaces welcoming, empowering, human-centered places, and if we can help them pull that off, that will make work more rewarding for tens of millions of people.

“We’ll be working with our most demanding clients, partnering with researchers and designers, and most of all, spending time with users until people see that workplaces and commercial real estate can deliver the kind of experiences that are typically associated with great hotels, cruises or restaurants,” he said. “I searched long and hard to find the right person to lead this effort, and within two minutes of meeting Annie Dean, I knew we had found our leader.”