This is an excerpt from the book “The World Is Your Office: How Work From Anywhere Boosts Talent, Productivity, and Innovation,” written by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Harvard Business Review Press, April 2025.
To date, most of the discussions surrounding remote work and work from anywhere (WFA) have centered on traditional white-collar, desk-based jobs— occupations like computer programming, IT help desks, accounting, legal, marketing, HR, and editorial services. Technological advances, specifically the expansion of the use of digital twin technology, are creating opportunities for more tasks and jobs to be performed remotely using digital tools. In turn, these opportunities present vast possibilities for sectors traditionally seen as in-person workplaces—like agriculture, manufacturing, and warehouse operations—to become welcoming of WFA.
Digital twin technology is an umbrella term used to describe the process of replicating a real-world operation in real time but done so using a digital format. One simple example is a control center in a factory. Rather than needing to stand next to a machine to read its settings, a digital twin would allow the worker to monitor (and often, control) the settings via a digital and virtual dashboard. The worker might be sitting in an office, or even at home, to monitor and control the functions of the dashboard.
Digital twins can go beyond reporting and allowing access to simple settings. When combined with machine learning algorithms, digital twins can even begin to make operational adjustments autonomously. Applications of digital twin technology are at work in a range of industries, including agriculture, transportation, health care, and manufacturing.
In farming, digital twins are being used to monitor and care for agricultural crops from afar. With time, these processes could also become automated, with an algorithm deciding when to weed or water a field based on the reports from the field’s digital twin. At Rome’s international airports, digital twin technologies have been used to develop a dashboard tracking passenger flows through the facility. This dashboard allows the airport operations center to react in real time to events like flight delays, which can have cascading effects from requiring later flights to change their scheduled gates of arrival/departure to adjusting staffing levels at security, immigration, and baggage areas.
Through a partnership with Siemens, Dublin’s Mater Private Hospital developed a digital twin of its radiology department, allowing it to visualize and track its MRI and CT workflows to improve the patient experience. As a result, the hospital ultimately reorganized the department layout and improved patient wait times and other key metrics. Finally, BMW is developing smart factories, starting with a facility in Hungary slated to open in 2025. BMW engineering teams will be able to control every aspect of the production lines at the facility virtually, reducing the time between design, testing, and physical production.
The introduction of these digital twin technologies can be beneficial to workers, allowing them greater geographic flexibility, though of course, as digital twins lead to increasing automation of tasks, there is necessarily some displacement and/or reskilling of workers.
I am currently studying the digital twin model at the Turkish energy company Enerjisa Üretim. The company has created a digital twin headquarters in Istanbul, centralizing all operations in a single room, overseeing multiple power plants across Turkey. Working in the digital twin headquarters enables the engineers at this company to live in Istanbul, instead of a remote region of Turkey. But this rearrangement of work has also required engineers to be upskilled and reskilled in areas such as machine learning, visualization of data, and so forth.
I strongly feel that the emergence of digital twins and the adoption of WFA in deskless settings will create a genre of so-called sky-blue-collared workers, workers at the intersection of blue-collar and white-collar work. Such workers will be skilled in operating and fixing expensive machinery but will also be capable of manipulating, visualizing, and interpreting data. This upside of digital twin technology is particularly relevant for jobs that have traditionally required the presence of human workers in unsafe and faraway places, like mining and on offshore oil rigs. Doing these tasks remotely, even if just from a nearby office, reduces the chance of injury on the job and a better work-life balance. Furthermore, once a digital twin allows operations to be monitored from a distance, what is to stop that distance between the worker and the operation from increasing exponentially? If a production line can be run from the plant manager’s kitchen table, why couldn’t it also be run by someone half a world away?
This geographic flexibility opens a lot of doors, particularly for global companies overseeing production in many countries. One example of this is Unilever, which I studied during the rollout of its digital twin technology in a Brazilian factory manufacturing detergents. There, the company combined digital twins of every machine in the factory with data processing and AI tools to not only move control of the machines to a centralized dashboard, but also to automate many of the adjustments traditionally done by a machine operator (for instance, adjusting controls related to how much gas was to be used to dry the detergents.) These changes allowed the company to optimize its processes, manufacturing larger quantities faster and reducing consumption of gas. They also changed the staffing requirements of the factory, both in terms of the total number of operators needed, either onsite or virtually, and the type of experience required for the factory workers (machinists versus engineers). Though the need to retrain or downsize its operational staff proved to be a major challenge for Unilever, overall, the benefits of digitization and virtual operations were clear. Since then, the company has digitized more factories worldwide, in Indonesia, South Africa, and elsewhere, and has been toying with the idea of opening a global operations center to oversee its global production. This model could be extended to different companies and industries with a digital twin center being located where workers want to live, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of geographic flexibility.
Digital twin technology can ultimately extend the opportunity of WFA to all kinds of new industries, tasks, and frontline and desk-less workers in factories, warehouses, farms, hospitals, airports, and power plants, among other settings. Implementing digital twins requires a strategic plan focused on up-skilling, re-skilling, and retrenchment of workers.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from The World Is Your Office: How Work From Anywhere Boosts Talent, Productivity, and Innovation by Prithwiraj Choudhury. Copyright 2025 Prithwiraj Choudhury. All rights reserved.
