2025 Year End Recap: The Return to Office Debate, AI Predictions & Season 4 Preview

[00:00:00] Neal Foard: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and space-age technology.

[00:00:05] Gary Sorrentino: There are still gray-haired senior managers out there who are thinking, “For 25 years, I’ve been a leader of this type of group, and that’s the way I know how to lead—so everybody should come in.”

[00:00:14] Aaron Darcy: I’ve seen transformations fail because people don’t focus on the fundamentals.

[00:00:17] Chad Townes: One mission isn’t just one mission. It’s a thousand little missions that the leader can then tie all together.

[00:00:26] Intro: Technology has transformed how we live, work, and connect. Behind that change are visionary people with bold ideas. Welcome to The BridgeCast, where host Scott Kinka explores hybrid work, AI, and our evolving future with tech’s brightest minds. Presented by Bridgepointe Technologies—experience a better way, the Bridgepointe way.

[00:01:01] Gene Volpe: All right, we’re going to shift gears here. We’re going to go live to the Tech Summit. I’m going to pull two clips: the first will be from Gary Sorrentino, the Global CIO of Zoom, and the next will be Chris MacFarland, the Chief Development Officer at Comcast.

[00:01:16] Gene Volpe: This was the two-parter we did live in Miami. The episodes were released on October 30th and November 4th. Go back and watch them. Here is what Gary said: “By 2030, a new wave of leadership will address the return-to-office and hybrid work.” Let’s play that clip.

[00:01:33] Gary Sorrentino: We’re in a state where there are still gray-haired senior managers out there thinking that because they’ve led a certain way for 25 years, that’s the only way to lead. Their mindset is: “Everybody should come in.”

[00:01:46] Scott Kinka: Yeah.

[00:01:47] Gary Sorrentino: I think by 2030, statistics show a new wave of leadership will come aboard and readdress this. This next wave will ask, “What’s right for the people that work for me, and what’s right for the outcomes of my company?” They might throw away the “older guy’s book.” We’ll see that change soon because that’s when Boomers and upper-end Gen Xers will start retiring. About 10,000 Boomers retire every day.

[00:02:15] Scott Kinka: Sure.

[00:02:15] Gary Sorrentino: We’re going to see a new cohort—Gen Zs and Gen Alphas who are 12 years old now. They are already thinking about companies, and they don’t want to work in “mom and dad’s company” anymore. They want quality of life and a different way of working.

[00:02:34] Gene Volpe: So, are we throwing away the “older guys’ books” on this? More specifically, is the office dead?

[00:02:42] Scott Kinka: No, the office isn’t dead, but traditional office use is—more than likely. Certain industries will always have offices due to physical requirements, like hospitals, medical facilities, or manufacturing, even if those are increasingly run by robots.

[00:03:12] Scott Kinka: But for traditional information work—the kind of work technology people do—the traditional way we think about the office is largely a dead concept. My friends in commercial real estate probably can’t believe I’m saying that. It doesn’t mean we don’t need places to gather, but I agree with Gary. COVID pushed it forward; we didn’t have a slight generational motion over time—everyone just went home and realized, “Oh, we can do this.”

[00:03:33] Scott Kinka: Then we were faced with modality changes. How do we meet? How do we handle “water cooler” moments? Some reacted by demanding everyone come back, citing a lack of collaboration. That’s a moderate, short-term reaction. But the reality is a wave of new workers is coming in who have never worked any other way.

[00:04:17] Scott Kinka: If you want to attract talent, you need a purposeful strategy around hybrid work. We’ve “crossed the chasm”—hybrid isn’t a stopgap; it’s where we’ve landed. Businesses must plan and architect for it.

[00:04:44] Scott Kinka: You need to define your remote and in-office processes. We have to focus on empowering and securing the user, not the user’s location. There’s a lot happening with Zero Trust security to meet this need. I love hearing Gary talk about this; it’s a real passion for him.

[00:05:09] Gene Volpe: It’s always fun to listen to him. This next one is the Chris MacFarland clip. At the end, he mentions a “magical thing” that gets lost. I’m going to ask you what that magical thing is. Here’s Chris.

[00:05:25] Chris MacFarland: Fundamentally, a business has to decide what its culture will be, including employee engagement and where people work. We are in an era where you want to meet customers where they are and provide the capabilities for them to work efficiently.

[00:05:47] Chris MacFarland: The challenge we see with younger generations is that it’s hard to onboard, train, and provide “quasi-apprenticeships” remotely. There is this really magical thing that gets lost.

[00:06:01] Gene Volpe: So, what gets lost?

[00:06:03] Scott Kinka: The “water cooler” gets lost. Is that a problem with hybrid work, the new generation, or the way we’ve historically trained people? I’d venture it’s the latter. We don’t know how to adopt people into the business yet because we haven’t changed our paradigm. Gene, what was your first office job?

[00:06:28] Gene Volpe: You’re making me go back! I guess it was at Reliance, in the mainframe section printing booklets for an insurance company.

[00:06:35] Scott Kinka: On your first day, did they send you to an extensive training program, or did they just chuck you in with everyone else?

[00:06:45] Gene Volpe: They said, “There’s Pedro in the back, there’s the machine. Get going.”

[00:06:49] Scott Kinka: Exactly. What gets lost is that it’s hard to establish culture and provide on-the-job (OTJ) training while staring at a screen. Human interaction is harder to get comfortable with through a monitor. It is incumbent on the current leaders to figure out how to establish those things for new workers. It isn’t the new worker’s fault that we don’t have a “water cooler” anymore.

[00:07:25] Scott Kinka: They want to learn, and they might have a better perspective on work-life balance than we do. Another thing we’ve done a poor job of is setting communications expectations. If I want a record of something, I email you. If I want something right now, I text you or use Teams/Zoom.

[00:08:34] Scott Kinka: A new worker might treat email like “snail mail”—they might not check it often and go straight to Slack or Teams. Most workplace communication issues aren’t about the generation; they exist because the business hasn’t set standards.

[00:09:11] Scott Kinka: We have five generations in the workforce. The oldest picks up the phone; the next emails. Have you ever had someone call to ask why you didn’t answer an email they sent 20 minutes ago? Email has “mail” in the name—it’s not meant for a 10-minute response! The next generation texts or uses Instagram. Business and IT leaders must set the standard for communication expectations.

[00:09:54] Gene Volpe: So, business leaders: if you’re not on Insta, get there! [Laughs] All right, we had some nuggets on leadership dropped on us this year from Aaron Darcy and Chad Townes. I’ll play Aaron’s clip from Lumen first, regarding business transformation.

[00:10:19] Aaron Darcy: CIOs today, with AI, cloud, and explosive growth in data, can’t just be operators. You have to think about transformation. If you’re not comfortable with that, surround yourself with people who are. You won’t get to where you need to go without transforming your processes. It’s easy to say, but hard to do. Transformations often fail because people don’t focus on the fundamentals.

[00:11:02] Scott Kinka: Violent agreement. I’m going to adopt some of his language. The role of the IT leader has changed; you are now a transformation agent. The CIO should be sitting next to the CEO, CRO, and CFO. If you just want to “punch the clock and watch the screen,” you aren’t a CIO.

[00:12:08] Scott Kinka: Most transformation is now technology-led. You need managers to run the staff, and hopefully, you can use AI and automation to make those jobs more efficient. But the primary function of the CIO is leading the business through transformation focused on patient outcomes, customer outcomes, or sales.

[00:12:46] Gene Volpe: Love it. One more clip on leadership from Chad Townes of AT&T.

[00:12:56] Chad Townes: You have to build custom metrics. Everyone wants to know if they’re doing a good job, but the metric isn’t the same for every group. It must tie back to the central theme but be specific enough so the group knows that achieving it lends to the collective effort. I love getting everyone focused on one mission—but one mission is really a thousand little missions tied together.

[00:13:32] Scott Kinka: CIOs should go listen to that full episode. Chad is like the “Mr. Fix-It” of AT&T. He’s a chief change agent. This clip resonates because at Bridgepointe, we talk about the “Big Rocks” theory.

[00:14:14] Scott Kinka: If you fill a vase with sand and small stones first, the big rocks won’t fit. You have to start with the top-level initiatives. A million little missions must have a direct line to the immediate leader’s goals, and ultimately to the five goals of the CIO or CEO. If a project doesn’t trace back to those “Big Rocks,” is it really that important?

[00:15:43] Scott Kinka: You still have to keep the lights on, but ensure there’s a direct line from those million little projects up to the ones that matter.

[00:16:11] Gene Volpe: Good advice. One more clip from our friend Neal Foard. This ties everything together.

[00:16:25] Neal Foard: We are primitive creatures. The phrase is: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and space-age technology.” We still make decisions based on emotions. Let’s use that space-age technology to pull us back to the “campfire” and do what we know is true: people buy from people they like and trust.

[00:17:00] Scott Kinka: That says it better than I ever could. We’re mammals; we react to stimuli. But we work within medieval institutions—hierarchical structures where we measure productivity by how hard someone looks like they’re working rather than their output.

[00:17:42] Scott Kinka: Then we have space-age tech that should help us think faster or build autonomous structures. It’s the most interesting time to be in tech because all three of those things are colliding. The job of the CIO and CEO is to rationalize those three elements.

[00:18:36] Gene Volpe: I’m going to go rapid-fire on you now for the sake of time. We’re 94 episodes in. Looking back at the 26 episodes we did in 2025, was there a guest who changed how you look at the tech landscape?

[00:19:15] Scott Kinka: Our ongoing conversations with Neal Foard made me think about how we speak about tech and engage with customers from a human-centered perspective. When we started, I thought this would be the “nerdiest podcast in history,” but the natural progression has been toward making tech usable for humans. You see it in the numbers—our “hit” episodes are often the more philosophical ones.

[00:21:06] Gene Volpe: You often quote Sun Tzu: “Energy without strategy is just chaos.” How does that tie back to productivity?

[00:21:41] Scott Kinka: It’s about intentionality. Our current measures of productivity don’t fit how we work today. If a person uses AI and gets 30 things done from home while another person shows up early in a tie but only gets three things done, how do we measure that? Energy doesn’t always equal results. You have to have a plan.

[00:22:44] Gene Volpe: Should workers be worried about being replaced by AI, or should they focus on becoming experts at prompting the machines?

[00:23:06] Scott Kinka: Some jobs will be outsourced to robots or AI, but AI needs to be instructed. It’s referential, not self-referential. Experts who know how to prompt will always be needed. If you’re concerned, get a free ChatGPT account and experiment. If you’re a factory worker, be the best “bumper putter-on-er” who also knows how to train the machine to do it.

[00:24:45] Scott Kinka: Chris MacFarland is hopeful; he thinks this could be the “golden age of humanity” because we get more time back to be humans. But the “medieval infrastructures” need to change first.

[00:30:56] Gene Volpe: All right, last thing. Predict the top trends for 2026.

[00:36:03] Scott Kinka: Most lists focus on tools. For 2026, I’m focusing on a design list—how organizations work, scale, and compete. One: we need to move AI to the background. If we’re still talking about AI, we’re probably not using it right. It should just be the engine underneath the hood.

[00:38:08] Scott Kinka: Two: hybrid work will become a performance strategy, not just a cost-recouping strategy. Three: cybersecurity will shift from “Zero Trust” to “What do we trust?” It’s about knowing who is in your network rather than just trying to keep everyone out.

[00:39:08] Scott Kinka: Lastly, IT leadership becomes about orchestration. We have the tools; now we need to focus on how we use them for outcomes. That’s our challenge for Season 4. We’ll have more live episodes, more authors, and more people from outside the tech community.

[00:41:29] Gene Volpe: That’s a wrap.

[00:41:33] Scott Kinka: To 2025 and into 2026. Gene, thank you.

[00:41:42] Outro: Thanks for spending your most valuable asset with us—your time. If your company is looking at digital transformation, Bridgepointe Technologies can help. Check out bridgepointetechnologies.com (don’t forget the ‘e’) or reach out to Scott Kinka at skinka@bpt3.net. Please give us a five-star review! I’m Scott Kinka, and until next time: there’s a lot of noise out there—do what you can to be the signal.