AI has handed every flexible office operator the same tools. The result is a sector where marketing increasingly looks and sounds alike. The operators who stand out will use AI to sharpen their brand and learn faster from every enquiry.
That was the thread running through Rebuilding marketing for the AI era, a seminar for CMOs and marketing directors hosted by 3Search and chaired by Charlie Rawstron. Panellists Duarte Garrido (co-founder, DOJO AI), Victoria Rusnac (agentic AI trainer and consultant) and Jada Balster (global marketing lead, Perk) set out how marketing teams are rebuilding. Four shifts stand out for flex office providers, and none of them needs a big budget.
Fix AI slop at the source
Off-brand decks and bland copy are a workflow problem, and that makes them fixable. The panel agreed that a single prompt produces slop, while a workflow trained on your brand guidelines, with a review step built in, produces quality. Some brands now run every draft through a tone-of-voice agent that flags off-brand copy before it’s published.
There’s a limit, though. As Garrido put it, when everyone uses the same tools, output converges, so original ideas still have to come from people.
Most flexible office operators have brand guidelines nobody opens. Turn them into a reviewing workflow for listings, social posts, brochures and broker packs, and give your brand owner proper time to build it.
Make room for a marketing engineer
A new role is emerging: the marketing AI engineer. Half builder, delivering the projects with the biggest commercial impact. Half teacher, upskilling the wider team so capability doesn’t sit with one person.
Not everyone is convinced. Garrido would rather hire creative, critical thinkers as tools become easier to use. Rusnac warned that experienced agentic talent is scarce, so most teams will need to grow their own.
For operators with one to 20 locations, a full-time hire is rarely justified. Give one team member protected time and a clear remit, or bring the capability in fractionally. Then pick two real problems, such as enquiry follow-up or occupancy reporting, and aim for a working solution within a month.
Build two brains: individual and company
Individuals are quickly building their own AI second brain. The bigger prize is a shared company brain: brand, positioning, customer insight and what has worked before, sitting beneath every tool the team uses. Rusnac was candid that no platform does this well yet, and teams are stitching it together themselves.
In multi-site flex businesses, much of the best knowledge sits with general managers and sales leads. Capture location facts, pricing rules, occupier profiles, objections and win reasons in one place, with one owner. Structured location data is also what AI search tools and marketplaces such as Office Tier List use to match occupiers to the right flexible office.
Let your marketing compound
Channels have long been managed in silos. AI can read across them at once, so an SEO insight sharpens Google Ads and website behaviour shapes social targeting. Garrido sees the biggest gain in a lower cost per acquisition.
The compounding comes from closing the loop: data becomes insight, insight becomes a campaign, and results feed back into shared context. Each win is reused across the team rather than living in one person’s head.
For flexible office providers, reporting is the place to start. Bring enquiries, viewings, conversions and spend per location into one view, and feed the patterns into next month’s plan. Doing more is not the same as doing better.
What this means for flexible office operators
Most marketing teams are still early, and that’s fine. Protect the brand, give someone time to build, capture what you know and join up your reporting. Then set one measure of success, such as cost per viewing or per signed deal by location, and track it.
As Rusnac put it, time, not budget, is now the scarcest resource. Expect productivity to dip before it rises.
Spaces to Places works with UK flexible office providers, from single-location businesses to those managing up to 20 sites, as a fractional marketing partner. If you’re working out where AI fits in your marketing strategy, we should talk.
