THE TAKE
This week I set an out of office. Two words that once meant something simple, I am not here, deal with it Monday, now read more like a polite fiction. The desk in Dubai is empty. The notifications are not. And that small gap between the message and the reality is, I think, the most honest snapshot of modern professional life we have.
The numbers say I am not unusual. Fifty four percent of employees check work email while taking time off, and eighty five percent receive work messages, calls or emails after hours, more than a third of them every single day. The reason is rarely workload. It is reputation. Thirty four percent say they stay connected because going quiet would change how managers and colleagues see them. We have quietly redefined availability as a character trait. The autoreply has become the most widely ignored document in corporate life.
So I am running an experiment. For the next two weeks I am genuinely stepping away from the day job, my first holiday of any kind in 2026 to be honest, but not away from the questions that sit underneath it. I am spending time in Paris with my wife Miki’s doctoral research group at Ecole des Ponts, where the conversation is about Industry 5.0 and Society 5.0, the idea that the next industrial chapter is not about replacing people with machines but about pointing technology back at human and planetary wellbeing. From there to VivaTech, Europe’s largest technology gathering, marking its tenth year with artificial intelligence as the thread running through everything. And then across to London Climate Action Week, where the talk turns from what technology can do to what it should do, and at what cost to the planet. Two sessions in particular sit right on my common ground. At the LSE, a conversation bringing together law, policy and civil society on where climate regulation is working and where the gaps still are. And at Somerset House, GlobeScan presenting its latest State of Sustainable Business findings, a read on what corporate leaders actually believe, as opposed to what they say in their reports.
On paper those are three different worlds, an academic research group, a startup spectacle, a climate convening. In practice they are arguing about the same thing from different corners of the room. Where does innovation stop being a private commercial choice and start being a public question of governance, rights and trust. That is the ground I find most interesting, and it is exactly where law, marketing, technology, sustainability, reputation and community stop being separate disciplines and become one conversation.
Consider the through line. Society 5.0 promises a human centred future, but a human centred future is only as good as the rules that protect the human inside it. That is where governance enters. We are watching the rise of GovTech, the modernisation of how states deliver and regulate, and of RegTech, the tools that help organisations keep pace with rules that now change faster than any compliance team can read them. In 2025 alone, jurisdictions passed roughly one hundred and forty five new artificial intelligence laws. Seventy seven percent of organisational AI leaders now name data privacy as a significant concern for their strategy. The technology raced ahead. The guardrails are sprinting to catch up. And the people whose data fuels all of it are increasingly uneasy, sixty seven percent of consumers worry about how AI uses their personal information, and seventy percent of Americans say they have little or no trust in companies to handle AI responsibly.
This is the part that connects back to my unread autoreply. The erosion of the boundary between work and life is the same erosion happening between the personal and the harvested. An always on worker and an always on data subject are the same person, conditioned to believe that switching off is a luxury they cannot afford, and that their information was the price of admission all along. The right to disconnect, now law in some fifteen countries from France to Australia, is not really a workplace policy. It is an early, tentative attempt to answer a much larger question. In an environment engineered for constant capture, who gets to draw the line, and what happens when no one does.
This is where the marketing and reputation lens matters, because trust has quietly become the scarcest commodity in the technology economy. Eighty seven percent of people say strong privacy laws make them more comfortable engaging with AI tools. Read that again. Customers are telling us that regulation is not the enemy of adoption, it is the precondition for it. The brands that will win the next decade are not the ones shouting loudest about innovation. They are the ones that can be trusted with the off switch, that treat a customer’s right to step back, to be forgotten, to not be modelled, as a feature rather than a friction.
So my out of office is doing more work than it looks. It is a small act of governance over my own attention. A fortnight to sit in the rooms where the rules of the next era are being drafted, and to think about how a marketer trained in law, sitting in the Gulf, watching Europe legislate and Asia reimagine, can help organisations find the common ground between moving fast and being trusted. I will be off the desk. I will not be off the question.
THE SIGNAL
Eighty five percent of workers receive work emails, messages or calls after hours, and fifty four percent check work email while on holiday. Meanwhile sixty seven percent of consumers worry about how AI uses their personal data, and around one hundred and forty five new AI laws were passed worldwide in 2025.
Sources: SurveyMonkey and SpeakWise work life balance data 2025 to 2026; Termly and DataGrail AI privacy reporting 2026.
THE QUESTION
If an out of office reply no longer means you are truly unreachable, and a privacy policy no longer means you are truly unwatched, what would it take for your organisation to make the off switch real, for your people and for your customers alike?