Techies are heading back to office. But not all tech jobs need a desk

The shift towards WFO is being driven by the increasing need for collaboration, faster decision-making and closer alignment between business and technology teams, particularly as organisations move from experimentation to implementationNeelabh Shukla, Chief Business Officer, Careernet

Shukla added that the change is particularly visible in roles involving implementation, integration and closer interaction with business stakeholders.

The datasets are not directly comparable, but their direction is consistent: office-based technology hiring is gaining ground while hybrid and remote models are losing share.

Xpheno’s co-founder Anil Ethanur attributed part of the shift to the changing economics of technology delivery.

Remote and hybrid working formats delivered a spike in productivity & profitability during the early stages of pandemic-linked lockdowns. These gains proved difficult to sustain beyond a certain level and duratioAnil Ethanur, Co-founder, Xpheno

As employers focus again on sustainable productivity, collaboration and operational efficiency, WFO is increasingly being viewed as a way to improve coordination and decision-making.

But the bigger change may be that companies are becoming more selective about which work actually needs to happen in an office.

AI is creating more work that needs proximity

The return of WFO comes at an interesting moment. Artificial intelligence (AI) is making more technology work digital, yet the deployment of AI is also creating roles where physical proximity matters.

As companies move from AI experimentation to enterprise deployment, technology teams increasingly have to work with business functions, customers, enterprise systems, sensitive data and security frameworks.

TeamLease Digital CEO Neeti Sharma said this is changing the nature of technology work.

As AI moves from experimentation to actual deployment, more technology work involves collaboration, enterprise integration, data security and working closely with business teamsNeeti Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Digital

She pointed to Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), AI implementation specialists and enterprise integration engineers as examples of roles where the technology-business interface is becoming more important.

Careernet’s data illustrated the distinction. Around 69 percent of its AI/ML requisitions in 2026 were hybrid and 29 percent were office-based. But for FDEs and related engineering-management roles, around 64 percent were WFO.

That suggests AI is not necessarily bringing all technology workers back to the office. Instead, it is creating a sharper distinction between roles that can be performed independently and those that depend on close collaboration with customers, business teams or enterprise systems.

An engineer building or testing a model may have greater location flexibility than one deploying that model into a customer’s systems.

The end of the blanket work model

Kapil Joshi, CEO, IT Staffing, Quess Corp, said employers are increasingly making