AI startups don’t do RTO, their employees are already in the office

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — While large corporations negotiate return-to-office (RTO) mandates and employee resistance, AI startups have discovered the opposite problem: they cannot keep their people away.

AI startup founders have never heard of RTO

‘What is an RTO?’ was Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash’s response when asked whether he had ever sent a return-to-work memo.

‘People generally like to come in. We’ve never enforced it.’ Across the AI startup sector, founders describe the same voluntary pattern: employees — many of them young, equity-holding, and deeply invested in their company’s outcome — treat the office as the default.

Nicholas Bloom, economics professor at Stanford University, said age demographics and personal equity stakes have produced a work mode that is ‘almost entirely in-person’ and ‘100% work focused.’

“For a single 23-year-old with equity worth $20 million, it makes sense to work in the office for 100 hours a week,” said Bloom. “They don’t work from home, they home from work.”

AI’s frontier problems demand physical proximity

“Innovators have to be close to end users because end users are a part of the innovation system,” said Richard Florida, urban studies theorist and professor at the University of Toronto.

Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, said the company has never had to ask anyone to come in.

“People will actively avoid working remotely at this point,” said Xanthos, noting that most employees stay through breakfast, lunch, and dinner and that younger workers describe the in-person shift as ‘day and night.’

Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, said the company has grown into a larger office as it scaled and now designates Thursday as its only work-from-home day.

The voluntary in-person culture at AI startups reflects a convergence of incentives that corporate RTO mandates cannot manufacture: equity stakes that make overtime rational, frontier problems that require high-trust collaboration, and a demographic skew toward workers without family obligations pulling them home.

For BPO and offshore staffing providers, the AI startup model presents a specific challenge. These companies run lean, equity-driven, in-person-first teams that are unlikely to adopt low-touch offshore models in their early stages.

But as AI startups scale into enterprise markets, providers that can embed within high-trust, high-velocity delivery frameworks — rather than offering commodity staffing — stand to win contracts from a segment that has historically handled everything in-house.