@techreport{butler2025new,
author = {Butler, Jenna and Jaffe, Sonia and Janssen, Rebecca and Baym, Nancy and Hofman, Jake and Hecht, Brent and Rintel, Sean and Sarrafzadeh, Bahar and Sellen, Abigail and Vorvoreanu, Mihaela and Teevan, Jaime and Alsobay, Mohammed and Ankrah, Liz and Beers, Stephanie and Benzing, Megan and Bruch, Mia and Buçinca, Zana and Carpanelli, Mar and Cole, Amelia and Counts, Scott and Daepp, Madeleine and Edwards, Justin and Farach, Alex and Goldstein, Daniel G. and Gray, Mary L. and Hernandez, Javier and Horvitz, Eric and Immorlica, Nicole and Inkpen, Kori and Iqbal, Shamsi and Jagadeesh, Manasa and Lindley, Siân and Lucier, Brendan and Muchai, Mercy and Nand, Ambrita and Olteanu, Alexandra and O'Neill, Jacki and Peterschmidt, Max and Poelitz, Christian and Rabeeza,  and Henry Riche, Nathalie and Sarkar, Advait and Sitaram, Sunayana and Snellinger, Amanda and Suh, Jina and Tang, John and Tankelevitch, Lev and Tomlinson, Kiran and Trapasso, Anne and Troy, Adam D. and Verma, Gaurav and Williams, Jack and Zorn, Ben and Young, Jordana},
title = {New Future of Work Report 2025},
institution = {Microsoft},
year = {2025},
month = {December},
abstract = {Note from Chief Scientist and editor Jaime Teevan:
As you sit down to read the 2025 New Future of Work report, it’s worth pausing to consider the thread that ties the past five years of reports together. The inaugural New Future of Work report, published in 2021, focused on new ways people could work without relying on colocation as a key productivity tool. The second, in 2022, centered on the reintroduction of physical offices and the emergence of hybrid work. In 2023, we explored how large language models could reshape everyday work, and, in 2024, how those advances moved from promise to real‑world impact.

Each year, as I’ve written this introduction, I’ve found myself saying that the previous year marked a once-in-a-lifetime generational shift. But after five years, it’s clear that the reports aren’t capturing a series of separate revolutions. Rather, they are chapters in a single story of the digital evolution of collaboration, each representing a phase that builds on, and is enabled by, what came before.

Last year’s report highlighted research showing that AI delivers substantial gains in individual productivity. The next frontier, covered in this year’s report, is collective productivity: how teams, organizations, and communities can get better together. AI can bridge gaps of time, distance, and scale, but only if built correctly. We must design AI to support shared goals, group context, and the norms of collaboration, and this requires not just new tools but new ways of working.

Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more remains a stable north star as the terrain shifts. If the past five years taught us anything, it’s that the future of work is not something that happens to us, it’s something we create together, as a research community, as an industry, and as a public. As always, we invite you to join that effort, approaching it with curiosity, intentionality, and guided by evidence, so the next chapter of work is better for everyone.



Editors: Jenna Butler (Principal Applied Research Scientist), Sonia Jaffe (Principal Researcher), Rebecca Janßen (Senior Applied Scientist), Nancy Baym (Partner Research Manager), Brent Hecht (Partner Director of Applied Research), Jake Hofman (Senior Principal Researcher), Sean Rintel (Principal Research Sciences Manager), Bahar Sarrafzadeh (Principal Applied Research Scientist), Abigail Sellen (Distinguished Scientist), Mihaela Vorvoreanu (Principal Applied Scientist), Jaime Teevan (Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow).

For more information on Microsoft's New Future of Work Initiative, see aka.ms/nfw},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/new-future-of-work-report-2025/},
number = {MSR-TR-2025-58},
}