Imagine a workplace where you spend less time attached to a keyboard, worrying about how to word an email, write a report, craft a LinkedIn post, polish a presentation deck, or sound professional enough in an office-wide memo.
Instead, you stop hunching over a keyboard and start talking your way through a written correspondence, the way you might with another person.
Such a workplace may not be as far off as you imagine, according to Calum MacDougall, president of the enterprise division at audio equipment brand Jabra. Whether office culture actually keeps pace, though, is another question.
“The keyboard was invented in 1868, when Ulysses S. Grant was president—and it’s probably the only thing invented in 1868 that you still have in your office right now,” MacDougall tells Fast Company. “So it seems natural at some point that technology should be able to overtake it to create something new.”
AI will become more and more important in the workplace, he says, which is far from a controversial opinion. But he believes “the future will be here quicker than we think.”
“The way that you will want to communicate with your [AI] agents will be increasingly in the way that you communicate with your human colleagues,” he says. “Which is by voice.”
Less corporate speak, more creativity
MacDougall argues that AI could make work more conversational, and that, in turn, could promote creativity.
For starters, it’s easier to talk than it is to type. The average person types 40 words per minute but speaks much faster. (Depending on the source, estimates range between 100 and 160 words per minute.) So, people can naturally share more context, much more rapidly, when communicating verbally.
There’s also the question of how we formulate our thoughts. MacDougall argues that when people type, especially in a professional context, they tend to naturally self-edit. He predicts that rather than carefully crafting emails, prompts, and documents, conversational AI will encourage future workers to brainstorm, ask questions, and collaborate with it much as they would a colleague.
There is some research to support the idea that speaking and writing lend themselves to different kinds of thinking.
A literature review published on the open-access research platform SSRN at the end of last year by AI educator, speaker, and author Bryan Cassady—in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University—argues that speaking ideas aloud can increase both the volume and divergence of thought, particularly during the early stages of development.
Research from IBM in 2024 also explored how highly conversational AI interfaces could support creativity in the workplace, finding that “creativity emerges in the hybrid interstitial conversational space between human and AI.”
But what happens to decades of workplace norms built around polished written communication?
Younger workers are already questioning some of the conventions of the modern workplace. The “corporate ick” has become shorthand for Gen Z’s distaste for performative professionalism—from useless jargon to office attire and the pressure to put on a buttoned-up workplace façade.
“It’s just much more practical and efficient to talk to people like normal people, which we quite often don’t do in business,” MacDougall says. “To create a more casual, almost egalitarian way of working, which is more open—I think the technology can enable that.”
Pamela Pavliscak, an adjunct assistant professor at the Pratt Institute’s School of Information who studies human-computer interaction, tells Fast Company that with conversational AI, people can start with unfiltered spoken thoughts or use their own notes to talk through ideas.
“The really interesting thing that I’m seeing with voice interactions is that it can stay a little messy for a while, and sometimes the really interesting ideas come from that messiness,” she says. “It makes it easier to separate the idea of brainstorming and generating ideas from the idea of presenting them formally.”
Since so much corporate communication is rigid and templated, “this can feel liberating,” Pavliscak says.
The downside of thinking out loud
There is a paradox here, though, Pavliscak explains. Conversational AI might free workers from thinking in corporate-speak, only for AI to translate those messy thoughts back into something boring.
“While it might free people up from thinking in corporate, the end result will likely be smoothed out by AI into something more blandly professional,” Pavliscak says.
Voice-based AI, however, may preserve some of the personality that corporate communication has encouraged workers to water down. “Voice keeps that imperfection, that human signal that is so important,” Pavliscak says. Many leaders say humanity is going to be vital in an AI-led future, potentially giving value to those imperfections.
Getting there may take some adjustment. Keyboards have been around for a long time, and speaking to AI introduces its own privacy concerns. There are also questions about the separation between the individual and the company when workers are encouraged to verbalize thoughts to corporate AI systems. “Do they then own my thoughts?” Pavliscak asks. “It feels very intimate.”
Generally, if people are seen talking out loud to themselves in the workplace, it can be a little awkward. One potential solution is technology that can detect extremely quiet speech, such as the voice-to-text accessibility app Wispr Flow, which says it can “keep up with fast talkers” and handle speech as quiet as a whisper. But as MacDougall says: “You can develop the technology fast, but then there has to be the cultural element to be ready to adopt it.”
Overall, a multimodal workplace could give workers more flexibility and autonomy over how they work. The keyboard is unlikely to disappear overnight—or maybe ever for some people. More likely is a multimodal future where workers move between speaking, typing, and other ways of interacting with AI, depending on what they’re trying to get done.
In this world, the messiness we’ve traditionally been encouraged to edit out of our working lives may turn out to be an asset rather than a bug.