Lights Out Office: not about working from home
A lights out office is not an office you have got rid of. You can keep the building. What gets automated is the office work itself, not the room it happens in.
Key takeaways
- You can keep the physical office. Getting rid of one does not make it a lights out office either, because you still do all the work, just somewhere else.
- The common objection to part 1: I have not had an office since the first COVID lockdown, so none of this is new.
- Cloud tools moved the paperwork into computers and made it available anywhere. That moved the office into your home. It did not remove the labour.
- The lights out office is automating the work itself, and that is what AI agents promise.
- Digital paperwork is what enabled it. Advances in LLMs, NLP and AI agents are what make it feasible.
Lights Out Office is not about not having a physical office. You can still have one, but have the backbone of your office work fully automated.
The idea of not having a physical office space is not new. It got enabled by real-time remote communication and cloud services a long time ago. In 2020, even businesses that resisted this idea were forced to adopt it. This eliminated the office as a physical space but did not remove the office work. More often, it actually created more overhead work for businesses: overhead for remote coordination, higher discipline standards to keep track of everything, new tools to learn and digital literacy, and so on.
Lights Out Office is about automating the actual office work and business processes.
Transcript
Lights out office. The idea of having your office running fully autonomously, without any human intervention, for some prolonged period of time.
The feedback that I got from my first video was: yeah, but that’s not new, I’ve been running without any office at least since the first COVID lockdown, 2020. And that is not it. Not having a physical office is not a lights out office, because you still do all the work.
Yes, cloud tools allowed us to get rid of physical spaces, and they moved all the paperwork into computers, made it digital and available to you at any time. Any location, anywhere, accessible from any time. But that just moved the office from some physical, dedicated physical space into your home, or into the homes of your staff employees. That’s not it. You’re still doing this job, this labor, manually. Whenever you get back home at night time, you still perform it.
So the idea of lights out office is automating the work, automating the tasks that has to be done. That is the promise of AI agents.
So cloud tools and the transformation to digital paperwork enabled it. But now AI, the advancements in the LLMs, NLP and in AI agents, make it possible, make this idea possible, feasible. And that’s what lights out office is about: fully automating the back office work.
Sources and further reading
- Lights Out Office: part 1 is the video this one answers. It defines the term and traces it back to lights out manufacturing; this post takes on the objection it drew.
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