Every conversation about AI right now is about productivity gains, job losses, and model capabilities. Almost nobody is talking about where the people displaced, dispersed, and disconnected by this transition are going to live. They should be.
I have spent eleven years building and advising in the coliving industry. I have watched operators collapse (Selina, The Collective). I have watched the category mature from backpacker hostels with cowork desks into a recognized asset class. I have watched the global market climb from a niche experiment to a $12.8 to $18.5 billion sector, growing at 15 to 27 percent CAGR, depending on whose definition you use. I have sat in rooms with investors, architects, founders, and residents across India, the UK, the UAE, and Australia.
And I can tell you with some confidence that most of the people making decisions about the next decade of coliving have not connected the AI transition to their thesis yet. That is the piece I want to write.
The Pattern We Keep Forgetting
Every major technology revolution has rewritten how humans live. Not metaphorically. Literally: what buildings get built, who lives in them, and how those people are organized.
When the Industrial Revolution pulled young workers from farms into factory towns, the housing market responded with the mill boardinghouse. In Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1830s, between 30 and 40 young female textile workers lived in brick boardinghouses adjacent to the Merrimack Manufacturing Company’s mills. Meals were shared. A boardinghouse keeper ran the house. New workers were onboarded into factory life by experienced hands. This was not charity. It was infrastructure. The factories needed a steady supply of young workers far from home, and the boardinghouse was the social container that made that workable.
A century later, the post-war boom produced its own housing form: the suburban single-family home, car-dependent and organized around the nuclear family and a single earner. Different technology (the automobile and mass manufacturing), different social contract, different dwelling.
The internet age produced coworking first (WeWork launched in 2010) and then coliving (WeLive, Common, The Collective, Cohabs, and Habyt, roughly 2014 to 2016). When knowledge work decoupled from physical offices, a new demographic emerged: remote-capable young professionals, mobile, urban, and without the anchors that previous generations used to organize their living arrangements. Coliving filled that gap. It is telling that the first generation of operators often described themselves as the “hotel-for-residents” or “WeWork-for-living.” That framing was a symptom of the moment, not the substance of the product.
The pattern is consistent. When work changes, living changes. Always.
AI is now changing work more radically and more quickly than anything we have seen since the Industrial Revolution. We should expect it to change how we live, and we should expect coliving to be a central part of that change.
The Three Forces Converging Right Now
Three macro forces are colliding in 2026, and all three push in the same direction.
Force one: careers are becoming non-linear and incomes are becoming volatile.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said AI could eliminate up to 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs. Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman has predicted most professional work will be replaced within 12 to 18 months. Anthropic’s own March 2026 research named the scenario the knowledge economy should be thinking about: a “Great Recession for white-collar workers,” modeled on the 2007–2009 doubling of the US unemployment rate, this time concentrated in the top quartile of AI-exposed occupations.
The headline numbers from 2025 understate the shift. Only about 55,000 layoffs were explicitly attributed to AI in official filings, but modeling-based estimates place actual displacements at 200,000 to 300,000 for 2025. Tech-sector layoffs were already at 45,000 by March 2026. Wage divergence is widening: a 56 percent wage premium for AI-skilled workers against 8 to 15 percent real wage erosion in routine cognitive roles. Entry-level roles, historically the on-ramp into professional careers, are the most exposed of all.
What this means for housing is rarely stated in the AI discourse but is obvious to anyone who has operated rental property. The 12-month lease with first-month, last-month, and security deposit was designed for a working population with stable, long-tenure employment. That population is shrinking. A 26-year-old junior analyst who just got displaced by agentic AI wants to retrain as a prompt engineer and is considering relocating to a city with a stronger AI cluster and cannot commit to a 12-month lease on a studio. The product does not fit the customer anymore.
Coliving fits. Flexible tenure (14-day to 12-month), bundled utilities, furnished spaces, and no six-figure deposits. The model was designed for mobile young professionals, which happens to be exactly the demographic AI is making more mobile and more precarious.
Force two: a loneliness epidemic that AI is accelerating.
The WHO estimates that 1 in 6 people globally experience persistent loneliness, linked to roughly 871,000 deaths annually. The US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And the research keeps getting sharper. NYU’s analysis of the 2024 Household Pulse Survey found that workers who are remote 3 to 4 days per week have 16 percent higher odds of loneliness than non-remote workers. Fully remote workers report loneliness at 27 percent versus 23 percent for hybrid. Gen Z remote workers are now the loneliest cohort in the workforce, with 20 percent experiencing loneliness weekly, roughly double the rate reported by Millennials.
The “loneliness economy” (therapy subscriptions, companionship apps, AI friends, rent-a-friend services) is projected at around $500 billion by 2026. Think about what that number is telling us. When a half-trillion-dollar industry exists to solve a problem, the problem is structural, not individual.
AI is amplifying this in two specific ways. First, it is removing human friction from workflows that used to produce incidental connection: the junior analyst’s call to the senior, the customer service exchange, the handoff between teams. Second, it is providing a plausible substitute: AI companions, AI coaches, AI therapists, and AI interview coaches. These are not bad products. They are the wrong product for the real problem, which is that humans need embodied, repeated, unscheduled contact with specific other humans. A Claude tab open on your laptop does not give you that. A WhatsApp group of friends in three time zones does not give you that. A coliving house where you share a kitchen with 30 people does give you that, by design.
Force three: location independence is now mainstream.
There are approximately 18.5 million American digital nomads as of 2025, according to MBO Partners, a 147 to 153 percent increase since 2019, and about 12 percent of the US workforce. Globally, estimates range from 40 to 45 million, with projections exceeding 60 million by 2030. Forty-one countries now offer digital nomad visas. Portugal, Spain, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico, and, most recently, Bhutan are actively competing for these workers.
But the AI layer changes what location independence means. When GitHub Copilot, Claude, and GPT can produce functional code from natural language, the “remote-capable” labour pool expands. Roles that previously needed office presence for training, apprenticeship, or hand-holding can now be done asynchronously with AI as the scaffolding. That produces more digital nomads, not fewer. And those digital nomads need housing that matches how they live: flexible, community-embedded, and ready to move into.
The traditional rental market has no answer for this. Serviced apartments are too expensive and too sterile. Hotels are too expensive and too transient. Airbnb has been hollowed out by regulation, price inflation, and the absence of community. Coliving is the one product category built specifically for this buyer.
What Eleven Years in Coliving Taught Me About What Matters
I want to be honest about something here, because coliving conferences tend to paper over it.
Most coliving operators are not actually building community. They are building furnished shared apartments with a WhatsApp group and calling it “community.” That was tolerable when the category was emerging and the alternative was a moldy London houseshare with four strangers from Gumtree. It will not be tolerable in the AI age. The moment the product becomes a utility, which is what happens when demand goes mainstream, community stops being marketing and starts being the actual moat.
What I have watched work, across operators in London, Dubai, Sydney, Bangalore, and Lisbon, is boringly consistent.
Onboarding is designed, not improvised. First-week rituals, house dinners, explicit introductions, a stated community contract. The moment a resident feels like they know three people by name, retention improves measurably.
Programming is peer-led, not operator-led. Member-hosted workshops, founder dinners, skills exchanges. Residents teaching each other is the moat. Coffee-and-croissant networking events are not.
Member curation happens quietly. The best operators know who fits their community and who does not. They accept the short-term occupancy hit to protect long-term culture. This is the opposite of the WeLive and Selina approach of filling the building as fast as possible.
Conflict resolution is a real operational capability, not a ticket in the PMS. When two residents have a problem, a community manager who can actually facilitate the conversation is worth more than any amenity upgrade.
The physical space is roughly 20 percent of the product. The other 80 percent is a designed social operating system that happens to have walls around it. Operators who invest in the 20 percent and starve the 80 percent are building the wrong thing for the decade we are entering.
The Three Roles Coliving Plays in the AI Age
Pull the threads together, and coliving becomes three things at once for the AI-era resident.
1. Economic shock absorber.
Flexible tenure, bundled utilities, no upfront deposits, furnished spaces. When careers break non-linearly, housing has to flex with them. A 30-year-old pivoting from consulting into AI product management after a layoff does not want to sign a 12-month lease while they figure out which city the opportunity is in. Coliving is built for that uncertainty. In a K-shaped labor market where middle-skill cognitive roles are the hardest hit, flex housing is not a lifestyle preference. It is a financial necessity.
2. Antidote to algorithmic loneliness.
Repeated, unscheduled, embodied contact with specific humans. The research on what actually reduces loneliness keeps pointing to the same thing: low-friction, regular, in-person time with a consistent group. That is what a well-run coliving house produces as a structural byproduct of its design. AI companion apps are palliative. Coliving is structural. The difference matters enormously at scale.
3. Peer-learning infrastructure.
Formal education cannot keep pace with how quickly AI tools are changing knowledge work. The fastest way to learn how to use a new model, framework, or workflow is to live next to someone already using it. Hacker houses in San Francisco figured this out in the 2010s. Neo, Founders Inc., The Archive, and half a dozen others are rebuilding it for the 2020s. The same logic applies to any knowledge worker reskilling for the AI age, which is roughly everyone.
Coliving operators who build for all three of these jobs will be building something far more defensible than a furnished shared apartment. They will be building the default social infrastructure for a generation of mobile, precarious, and constantly relearning knowledge workers.
What This Means for Operators
If you are running or building a coliving business, a few things follow.
Stop competing on amenities. Gyms, yoga studios, and rooftop terraces are table stakes. The differentiation game has moved.
Build flex tenure products that match career fluidity. 14-day, 30-day, 3-month, 6-month tiers. The “6-month reskiller between jobs” is going to be a meaningful segment within three years.
Program for peer-to-peer skill transfer. AI tooling workshops, founder dinners, reskilling cohorts. Treat your resident base as a learning network, not an audience.
Measure community outcomes, not just NPS. How many members in your house found a cofounder, a collaborator, or a roommate turned friend? That is the real retention metric. Everything else is a proxy.
Plan for segments most operators are still ignoring. Career-gap professionals. Silver splitters. Single-parent families. AI-era reskillers. The "25- to 35-year-old young professional” default is narrowing, not widening.
Embed learning infrastructure. Partnerships with bootcamps, AI cohorts, online communities. Coliving becomes the physical layer of a distributed education system.
Think about your product not as “affordable rooms with WiFi,” which is what most small operators still sell, but as a designed social operating system with walls around it. The operators who internalize this will own the next decade. The ones who do not will be consolidated out.
The Bet I Am Making
Every technology revolution rewrites how we live. The Industrial Revolution gave us the boardinghouse because people needed to live near factories. The post-war boom gave us the suburb because cars decoupled work from home. The internet age gave us coworking and first-generation coliving because knowledge work decoupled from location entirely.
The AI age will need coliving because work is becoming non-linear, isolation is becoming default, and peer learning is becoming the only way to stay current. That is not a trend. That is a structural shift. The operators and investors who see this clearly will not be building a lifestyle product. They will be building the social infrastructure of the next economy.
I am biased, obviously. Eleven years in this industry will do that. But I would rather be biased and right than unbiased and late.
If you are building in this space and thinking about what the next decade looks like, I would love to hear from you. The category needs more operators who are willing to think structurally about what is coming. Write in. Let us build the argument together.
Until next time,
Mayank Pokharna, EverythingColiving, BookMyColiving
Sources and Further Reading
Anthropic (March 2026). Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence. Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory.
Fortune (March 2026). Anthropic just mapped out which jobs AI could potentially replace.
FinFlowMax (March 2026). How AI Is Eliminating White-Collar Jobs (2025–2026 Data). Estimates of 200,000–300,000 AI-displaced or AI-foregone positions in 2025.
MindStudio (2026). AI Job Displacement: What the Data Actually Shows About White-Collar Employment.
World Health Organization (June 2025). Commission on Social Connection report. 1 in 6 globally experience persistent loneliness, linked to 871,000 deaths annually.
U.S. Surgeon General (2023). Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.
He, Wei, Goodman, Pagán, Cuevas, Bather (2026). Remote work and loneliness: Evidence from a nationally representative sample of employed U.S. adults. Journal of Affective Disorders.
CoworkingCafe (2026). Remote Work Well-Being Survey. Gen Z loneliness 2x Millennial rate.
MBO Partners (2025). State of Independence: Digital Nomads Trends Report. 18.5 million US digital nomads, 147–153 percent growth since 2019.
Everything Coliving (2026). Global Coliving Market Research. $12.8–18.5 billion market, 15–27 percent CAGR.
Market.us (2025). Co-living Market Size. Projected $32.3 billion by 2034 at 15.4 percent CAGR.
CV Observer (April 2026). The Loneliness Economy: Why Remote Work Created a $500 Billion Industry by 2026.
US National Park Service. Lowell: Story of an Industrial City – Boardinghouses. Historical reference on 1830s mill boardinghouses.
Windham Textile and History Museum. Life at the Mill Boardinghouse. Historical reference on industrial-era shared housing.
That’s it for this edition. If you found value in this newsletter, share it with someone building, operating, or investing in coliving. And if you’re working on something interesting in the space, a project, a deal, a new market, hit reply. We love hearing from the frontlines.
I’m such a huge fan of the truly authentic co-living model (typically smaller & rural) and love your economic perspective.