Industry leaders explore how design intelligence is transforming workplace strategy. At JLL's Signature Event in Sydney, in June 2026, Valentina Vulturu from ING Australia shares insights from ING’s 2026 workplace transformation, revealing how comprehensive employee engagement shaped every design decision. Joined by Jennifer Moore, JLL's National Practice Director for Design, and Angela Barwick, Executive Director of Real Estate Technology Services, the panel examine swhy strategic advisory must precede any real estate commitments. They discuss designing for workplace diversity beyond collaboration spaces, integrating AI and technology from day one, and redefining return on investment to measure business performance rather than just cost per square metre.

I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora, Eora Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging And welcome. It's lovely to see you all here. We thought this would be weather for ducks, but it's held off so that everyone can arrive safely, and we do have lots of umbrellas to send you on your way.

I thought it was very fitting that we had this at the Royal Botanic Gardens because people are a bit like plants. I mean, you can transplant a plant or you can transplant a person anywhere, but will they thrive and grow? I mean, you can plant a eucalyptus in northern Scotland and it might not do so well.

They probably didn't. And that's what this is all about. What are the microclimates, the greenhouses, the hothouses, the ferneries that we need to create for our people to get the best out of them? Because like plants, if people are given the right environment, they will do so much better. So let me walk you through what we have in store for you this afternoon, and it's very exciting.

Now, those of you who came last year will remember that we had Michael O'Loughlin, the champion AFL player, as the speaker first. Unfortunately, a lot of people couldn't concentrate on Michael, what Michael was talking about because they were so excited about the panel that we had, of which I was a member.

We'll explore how strategic advisory, cross-functional collaboration, and comprehensive employee engagement set the foundation for successful outcomes, what we shorthand as working together. And then why human-centric design matters more as AI advances. We'll examine workplace imbalance challenge and look how to create design for diversity, those different microclimates, including neurodiversity, and discuss how AI is changing what we need to design for, what we need to design for.

From personalized environments to spaces that adapt to individual work patterns. And technology is enabling a fundamental shift. The workplace of the future adapts to people, not the other way around. And defining and measuring return on investment. We'll address the question that inevitably comes up within the C-suite, what does this actually mean?

Then after that, we're very excited to have Matt Hall. Now, Matt is a Red Bull Air Race world champion and former RAAF wing commander, a Top Gun fighter pilot, and a combat instructor. And he'll give us some insight into his world where the stakes are high and the margins are extremely thin, particularly when you're traveling at the speed of sound.

Now, let me welcome our distinguished panel to the stage. And first of all, we have Valentina Vulturo. Valentina is the lead transformation at real estate at ING. With over 15 years of experience in commercial real estate, she's currently w- leading ING's workplace transformation here in Sydney. And I'm pleased to say that Nelson and the team advised Valentina on that work.

Jennifer Moore, National Practice Director at JLL Design. With over 25 years of experience, she specializes in translating workplace data into design solutions that drive business performance and help organizations transform real estate from a cost center into a strategic advantage. And anyone who's been to our Sydney and Melbourne offices know exactly what that looks like.

Thank you, Jen. And finally, Angela Barwick. And Angela and I worked out tonight that we've known each other for 17 years when I was advising Suncorp on their Brisbane headquarters, and Angela was part of the JLL team working at Suncorp under Peter Athlick. She's now an executive director in our real estate management services technologies team at JLL.

Jennifer Moore: Thanks, Michael. Um, welcome everyone. Uh, as Michael said, I'm Jennifer Morse, national practice director for JLL Design.

And yes, today we're going to talk about design intelligence that drives business performance. So design intelligence is exactly what JLL Design is built around. Using data, technology, and human insight to make design decisions that create real measurable outcomes for our organizations that we're working with.

So Valentina, I might start with you. IMG is mid relocation right now, which puts you in a position that most people in this room have either been through or are about to go through. Before any design decisions were made, and before you potentially found a site or signed a lease, there was a whole advisory process.

Do you mind walking us through what that looked like, what drove the site selection, and what potentially could've gone wrong had you rushed it? A lot of things could've gone wrong.

Valentina Vulturu: Some

Jennifer Moore: did.

Valentina Vulturu: Uh, I think the planning phase is really, really important, and a lot of people, um, myself included in previous years, uh, rush into, okay, do we move, do we not move, was the right building kind of thing.

Angela Barwick: worked with in any market. That wasn't staged, I promise. I'm not getting paid for this.

Valentina Vulturu: Um, and I'm saying this because you look at design, and that's within the proverbial box that the tenancy is. But the tenancy needs to be flexible, so your lease matters, and it impacts your design. If your lease gives you the possibility to grow or to shrink, then you have more flexibility for the design later on, and that matters, I think, so much in the...

You know, we have to be agile, and brick-and-mortar oftentimes is very inflexible compared to what organizations actually need. And real estate is supposed to serve the business. That's what it is, and the business are the people. So I think that's important. Another part of advisory, and what I think is important when you set on this journey, is getting the, the right team.

I just want to say that. And in planning of the device, we've, we spent a lot of time, although we've... We're working on a short timeline. We spent a lot of time in finding out what our organization needs, which was plenty, plenty of workshops with our people, with different groups, different organizations within the company.

Our Rainbow Lions, our LGBTQ, uh, plus community, uh, Lioness, kind of can guess what that organization is, and so on and so forth. Special groups of people. Our salespeople, our wholesale bank people, who have a very different DNA. You, you need to spend time with the people to understand what they want, from CEO across everywhere.

Jennifer Moore: I love that. I love bringing how... It's, I think it's very important about having that team environment and having the right team around you, and that ties in with Angela from a technology perspective. When organizations don't necessarily bring you in at the start in the team, what can potentially go wrong, and what should they do to potentially get it right?

Some of them are things like infrastructure compatibility, uh, your cybersecurity requirements, um, even things like approval lead times, and all of those things can have a really material impact on the program and the overall cost of your project. So JLL's done some research, and, uh, it's technology and AI research from last year, so it's not this most current, but it is our, our latest research, and what we can see as the baseline is 89% of, uh, APAC companies are currently not getting the expected results from their technology systems from at least three of those systems.

So I think there is a real material financial cost to involving technology too late. Um, that could be things like reworking the design or delaying the fit-out because you have to upgrade, you know, something in the building. Um, y- all, all of those things, i- if, if technology's included in the advisory stage, your project team will make better decisions.

You will have better outcomes. Um, there'll be lot, like, a lot less rework, and, you know, you'll, you'll start at the right, start off on the right foot. So- Can

Valentina Vulturu: I add something to this? Yeah, please do We found in our project, uh, that it, property and IT teams need to work together, and more often than not, that doesn't happen.

Fantastic to get that, that data. How is that useful if you're not measuring occupancy in the open space? You're getting pieces of data, and you're getting to the problem, exactly what you said. Yes. You have so much data and have no idea what to do with it. So by talking to each other, we set a- we identified what's the right technology where we're not, you know, bur- being a burden, us as property onto our tech team with the technology we want to implement and give them double the work.

But also, we get the, the right data, and they're able to support us, you know, to make sure that penetration tests pass and whatever it may be. And I think that that collaboration between tech and property can bring such good advantages, and those are two silos you should absolutely break in your company with a property project.

So the phase deserves time, and it's where that real design intelligence begins at the start. Designing for reality and what does the office need in 2026? So post-pandemic, collaboration was everything, and we ended up with spaces now that are not really designed for what people need in the office now. So Valentina, what are you experiencing today?

What are you hearing today when you're in this phase, and how is now that informing what you're gonna build next?

Valentina Vulturu: It's funny because I was, I was in the Netherlands in, um, head office when we were doing hybrid ways of working and, like you said, designed for collaboration. I found that in Australia, people are coming to the office a bit more than in other places of the world, and that means to us that indeed you need- spaces for people to not just collaborate and have coffee,

Valentina Vulturu: We don't have the problem of having a collaborative, too collaborative office 'cause our office was designed before 2016. Yeah? Yeah. So our office today, you basically can get a desk or a meeting room and that's it. Uh, so we don't have that problem. Um, we are in the privileged position of designing the space now after things have settled with hybrid work, I think.

And what we're seeing is that you look at activity based workplace and you design all these different settings, that's wonderful, but you have very different people and different types of work. Like, there are people who will, highly specialized, very senior, that need quiet 'cause they are 90% of the time at their desk and they need quiet.

Mm. So we are including things like pods, um, from demountable partitions, very good sci- soundproofing that gives you a really grounding feeling. They're great for Teams calls. Put uncomfortable chairs in there so people don't consider them their private office the whole day. And they can do a Teams call, but also somebody can just, you know, when they're having a stressful moment, they can just go in there and the sound of it, it feels like a podcast room, and you just, you know, get grounded.

Um, a lot of phone booths, like I said earlier, for people to do calls so then the open space can be not, "Shh," somebody's has a call, but To actually talk to each other. And I think that that diversity just really serves the diversity of our people. And from our CEO all the way to us as a project team, we viewed this project as a people project, and we keep, keep saying that and drill it into everything that we, we do.

And I know it sounds like a lot of marketing, and oh, LNG's so great, but it's, it's genuine, I promise you. You can talk to the people in this room that I work with. We actually do, um, think of these things when we make our design decisions.

Jennifer Moore: Yeah. I think what's really interesting as well that we are also starting to talk about when I bring in the AI conversation is the focus room and the phone booths and the things that people are also looking at the future of people actually not just needing them for phone conversations, but talking to AI as- Yeah

Angela Barwick: Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question. I think the honest truth, and again, from our, our AI research last year, 92% of companies are tech- are testing and piloting AI now, which is, you know, up quite a lot in recent years.

But the interesting part is only 3% of those companies are actually achieving their goals. So what that says for AI right now, it's the experimental phase. Mm. Okay? So we're just experimenting. But there are some AI applications, um, or, um, applied to workflows where they genuinely are having a big impact, and it's un- not surprising that that's in the occupancy analytics st- um, type space because what AI is doing is translating those traditional space utilization metrics into the financial impact.

It could be, you know, your bookings, um, systems. They're only telling part of the story. Yeah. And what AI is doing is it's stitching it together, and it's actually bringing all of those, um, different disparate systems to show you the pattern, so it's not just the average utilization, but when are they working, where are they working, all of that extra information that a single system couldn't do- Absolutely

But looking to the future, I think for AI in the workplace, what we're seeing is the personalization. Mm. Personalization in the environment whereby we might have adaptive lighting or, you know, control of space and temperature. They are, are not new either. They've been in pli- pilot ... Smart buildings have been in pilot for a long time, but now they're becoming the norm.

They're putting them into practice, and I think the reason for that is with those technologies, with the AI behind them, we're now able to make a clearer impact on, uh, not only the employee experience but also the dual benefit of our energy, um, efficiencies and energy saves. And when we can tie that back to the sustainability piece, I think that's- Yeah

Jennifer Moore: Yeah, and bringing that technology together with the lived experience that Valentina was talking about and having those working together, not separate work streams, is very, very important, too. Our final ques- uh, topic we were talking about is defining success and what return on investment actually is.

It's a question everyone wants answered, and it means different things to different organizations. So- Valentina, have you built a specific methodology around what measuring success looks like for ING?

Valentina Vulturu: It's interesting 'cause, um, recent, uh, since recently I started reporting to the CFO, so that should tell you that it's something really interesting.

It's nice that we got over 500 verbatims in the open-ended question at the end, so people really had a lot to say. We, I think we will look to see how our organizational health index may be, um, shifting after the move to see if we've done what we've set ourselves to do. But another one that just actually didn't come up to me until you just mentioned now with sustainability is, is that, is how much we're going to be more efficient energetically in operations by choosing a different building As well as our CO2, uh, reduction in upfront carbon compared to a new fit-out, um, as well as a diversion from, from landfill.

And we ... One of the pillars of our project was to support, uh, smaller companies that are pioneering meth- new methods of fabrication, so the best way to support this, um, uh, is by giving them business, obviously. Uh, so we, we set ourselves out to, to do that. Nobody's done it to this scale before. We'll see how it goes.

We'll let you know if we have delays. Um, but we, we said that, you know, IG globally says that we put sustainability at the heart, and we wanted to show that we practice what we, we preach. Yeah, there's some innovation in, in it. It'll be, it'll be very fun when we cut the ribbon to get some people to, to visit it and see and touch and feel what we've done.

Angela Barwick: Yeah, it's, it's, um, from a business case perspective, I think we see the CRE decision makers looking to reduce their cost through the portfolio optimization.

That's the top priority for the next few years, so that's where the business case really needs to start. The interesting thing is that the definition of ROI, uh, is expanding. It's the now including things like talent retention or attendance without mandates, and what's the operational resilience of the building?

And AI will change us to be outcome-focused. Outcome and performance-based metrics will become more important, so things like the quality of our outputs, um, whether that's how many transactions we're doing, or the engagement with our staff, or the retention lift from HR. So I think with those metrics, the key thing that we have to do if it's a CRE project is we need a connection between the real estate data, the HR data, and the business performance outputs.

So that's why those cross-functional teams and having IT there are so important, but it's also HR and, and all the business streams because if we can get that integrated data there, we will then have the, the insights. So I think that from a business case, from a metrics, um, perspective, it's really a shift from what we used to talk about having efficiency gains and efficiency dividends now to performance metrics.

Jennifer Moore: Mm. Thank you. We've really covered the full arc here from the advisory foundation to designing for how people are working today and what measuring the success actually looks like.

But I wanna finish with one thing, something actionable. If one person in this room takes one step in the next 90 days to change how their organization approaches workplace, what would you recommend this step to be? Do you wanna start?

Valentina Vulturu: Uh, w- one item that I mentioned earlier, um, don't treat this as a side desk project.

I recommend Angela with that, too. Di Jones. The, the team has been brilliant. We're ahead with our timeline. We went to tender three months ahead of schedule, just putting it out there. Um, no, Anthony's not paying me to say that either. I think that this would be ... Get the team, and they, they will make magic happen, 100%.

Angela Barwick: For me, I think I would say audit now, audit before you invest. It's interesting because the gap, um, between where you think your utilization is and where it really is when measured is actually much greater than what you think. And so I think if we look at the companies that are really successful with these programs, they have done that current state assessment.

Jennifer Moore: Amazing. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. That's the end of our panel. Um, and thank you, Valentina and Angela. You can ... We're done. Do you... Any questions? Yeah, we got time. Okay

Speaker 6: Um, okay. So I've recently learnt that, um, AI augmented, uh, delivery, uh, is best suited to people working together as opposed to working remotely.

Angela Barwick: Ooh, that's a good question. I'm not in agency, but it's, it's very, um, as I said, we're in that experimental phase, Doug. I think the, the key thing is that the, the AI that we'll put in for efficiency should be unlocking our strategic potential.

Um, but there is a cost and investment to do that. They're to- they do use tokens. You get- we, we see it at JLL, when we get to the end of the month, all of the coders are there using their tokens before they reset for the next month. Um, but as that pertained to agency, I might have to get someone else to, um, comment on that one.

Jennifer Moore: Any other questions?

Speaker 7: We haven't touched on innovation in the workplace. What spaces are you seeing now, or what are you designing for, to really drive innovation, both from a spatial and a technology perspective?

Valentina Vulturu: Ooh,

Jennifer Moore: good question.

It's kind of, you know, you have to let your people loose if you want to get them to innovate. Um, I think another thing like workload and having 100 tasks, um, to do before you can innovate, well, that's has nothing to do with the workplace. That's an organizational thing. You have to create the space and the time for people to, to be able to, to innovate.

I hope that the nice water view will help in our new building. Um, and from tech perspectives?

Angela Barwick: Yeah, it's interesting. I think from a tech perspective for innovation, innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. We hear a lot about, we talk a lot about innovation in technology because of the really dramatic growth in technology, and we can see it progressing so fast.

Speaker 7: Hello there.

I have a question. Um, how do you balance flexibility with budget constraints in uncertain times?

Valentina Vulturu: What, what do you mean by flexibility?

Speaker 5: Flexibility in either changing your design or just changing what you need to do.

Valentina Vulturu: Yeah. We are, like I said earlier, in a privileged position that, you know, your lease is expiring and that's when your amortization is off your balance sheet, so you can invest in space again.

It could be ... You could look at it from a transactional perspective. It could gil- get you in that position to make the changes. So don't think because you're halfway through the lease you can't do anything or you have to spend entirely money out of pocket. You, you might just get creative transactionally and partner with the landlord.

Speaker 7: Thank you.

Jennifer Moore: All right. Well, I might say thank you again, Valentina and Angela, and thanks everyone for coming. Thank you. Thank you.