For years, coworking was mainly associated with freelancers, startups and small teams that wanted to avoid a conventional office lease. That picture is becoming increasingly outdated.
Some of the world’s fastest-growing technology companies are now using flexible workspace for a different reason: as a landing platform when entering a new market.
Singapore offers a particularly interesting example. OpenAI and Anthropic are both operating teams of around 100 people from premium flexible workspaces in the city-state. At the same time, OpenAI is reportedly considering a much larger conventional office of approximately 100,000 square feet.
That combination reveals something important about the future of the office market. Flexible offices and traditional leases are not necessarily competitors. Increasingly, they can be different stages of the same corporate real estate journey.
Flex space has become a market-entry tool
Opening an office in a new country traditionally requires a company to make several major decisions before its local operation has really begun.
How many people will be employed in two years? How much floor space will they need? Which district will work best? How should the office be designed? And is the company prepared to sign a long lease before those questions have clear answers?
For a fast-growing business, particularly one expanding internationally, that creates unnecessary risk.
Flexible workspace changes the sequence.
A company can enter a market, place its first employees in a ready-to-use professional office and start operating almost immediately. There is no need to complete a major fit-out, commit to more space than necessary or accurately forecast a local headcount several years into the future.
OpenAI’s Singapore presence illustrates the model clearly. The company currently works from roughly 100 desks at The Work Project in CapitaSpring. Anthropic, meanwhile, has reportedly taken approximately 100 desks at The Executive Centre in Ocean Financial Centre.
These are not two-person startup memberships. They are sizeable corporate teams using flex space in prime office buildings.
What happens when the team grows?
The next stage is where the story becomes particularly relevant for landlords and flexible workspace operators.
OpenAI announced earlier this year that Singapore would become home to its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States. The initiative is backed by a commitment of more than S$300 million and is expected to create more than 200 specialised AI roles over the coming years.
As its operations expand, so does the need for real estate.
The company is now reportedly in talks to lease around 100,000 square feet across five floors of the recently completed Shaw Tower. The negotiations may not ultimately result in a lease, but the potential move demonstrates how quickly office requirements can evolve.
A company may begin with 100 desks because speed and flexibility are the priorities. Once headcount, operations and long-term requirements become clearer, a dedicated headquarters can become more attractive.
That does not mean the flexible office has failed. Quite the opposite: it may have done exactly the job it was hired to do.
Coworking and conventional offices are becoming complementary
The office industry often frames flexible workspace and traditional leasing as competing models.
The Singapore example suggests a more useful way of looking at the market.
For an international business, the real estate journey could increasingly look like this:
Enter a market through serviced or coworking space. Build a local team. Test which location and workplace model work best. Expand within flex if necessary. Then move into dedicated space once the operation reaches sufficient scale.
In that model, flexible workspace acts almost like infrastructure for corporate expansion.
It removes friction at the point when companies have the least certainty and often the greatest need for speed.
This is particularly valuable in sectors such as artificial intelligence, where hiring plans and business growth can change extremely quickly. Committing to a conventional office based on a five- or ten-year forecast becomes difficult when a company may not know what its team will look like even 18 months from now.
Flexibility effectively buys time for better information.
A new opportunity for flexible workspace operators
There is also a commercial lesson here for coworking and serviced-office operators.
The next generation of flex customers may not always be small businesses looking for ten desks. They could be multinational companies entering a city with 50, 100 or even several hundred employees.
That changes what operators need to provide.
Enterprise occupiers expect privacy, security, strong IT infrastructure, meeting facilities, professional hospitality and enough flexibility to expand without repeatedly relocating teams. They may also require dedicated areas that feel much closer to a private headquarters than a traditional open coworking floor.
Operators capable of meeting those requirements can position themselves much earlier in the corporate real estate decision-making process.
And even if a customer eventually leaves for its own headquarters, that relationship can still create substantial value. The operator may have housed the company for its entire market-entry phase, provided meeting space before permanent premises existed and potentially continue serving distributed teams after the headquarters opens.
The office decision is becoming a journey, not a single lease
There is still reason for caution. The current wave of AI investment is moving exceptionally quickly, and not every burst of technology-sector office demand will translate into permanent long-term occupancy.
But the underlying real estate model extends well beyond AI.
Companies entering new countries increasingly want to delay irreversible decisions until they understand their workforce, customers and growth prospects better. Flexible workspace allows them to establish a physical presence without immediately locking themselves into a fixed footprint.
For landlords, operators and occupiers, that requires a change in mindset.
The question is becoming less about whether a company prefers coworking or a conventional office. The more useful question is: what type of space does the company need at this stage of its growth?
OpenAI and Anthropic’s Singapore operations offer a glimpse of what that future could look like. Flex space gets the team into the market quickly. Dedicated space follows when scale justifies it.
For the office industry, the opportunity lies in connecting those stages rather than treating them as separate markets.
