Apple CEO says Remote Work is the 'Mother of all Experiments'

More than two years after the Covid-19 pandemic forced employees to leave the office, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that the role of remote work has yet to be determined. "We're running the mother of all experiments because we don't know," Cook said in response to a question about the biggest changes taking place in the workplace right now. Cook was speaking at the TIME 100 symposium in New York.

He said, "We're running a pilot and trying to find a place that makes the best of both of these worlds." While Cook prefers the "serendipity" of in-person meetings, he says virtual interactions are "not inferior, just different."

Apple has been stricter than some of its peers in requiring employees to return to the office, and the company's former machine learning director, Ian Goodfellow, publicly cited its policy as the reason he left the company in May.

"I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," Goodfellow told The Verge's Zoë Schiffer at the time.

The key, he says, is to find a model that leverages the advantages of both in-person and virtual engagement, and that the final model will look very different from what is currently in use.