Body Forward is a coalition of organizations committed to designing work around the realities of human biology.

For decades, the workplace has treated the body as something to manage around work: sit still, stay focused, push through fatigue, squeeze exercise into your time off. Technology has made many kinds of work easier and faster, while also making the average workday more sedentary, screen-based, and disconnected from the body.

AI gives us an unique opportunity to rethink that trade off.

If machines can take on more of the work that requires speed, repetition, recall, and constant digital attention, then workplaces should create more room for the capacities that humans depend on: movement, recovery, physical awareness, social connection, creativity, judgment, and joy.

We call that Full Body Intelligence.

Full Body Intelligence starts with a simple premise:

Thinking doesn’t just happen from the neck up.

Our ability to concentrate, solve problems, make decisions, regulate emotion, connect with other people, and generate ideas is shaped by what is happening throughout the body.

Movement is not time away from thinking and recovery is not the opposite of productivity.

Physical health is not a perk.

They are part of the infrastructure of human intelligence.

What Body Forward wants to change:

We want companies to stop treating biological needs as an individual wellness responsibility and start considering them in the design of work itself.

That means asking questions like:

How should the workday change when AI makes some kinds of cognitive labor faster?

What should technology do to encourage rather than eliminate human movement?

How should meetings, schedules, offices, devices, and workplace norms reflect what bodies actually need?

What happens to creativity, judgment, connection, & performance when people have more opportunities to move and recover?

And what would it mean to measure a great workplace not only by output, but by whether the people in it can function at their best?

Body Forward will bring together companies that want to experiment with those questions, learn from emerging research, test new practices, and help establish a new standard for work in the AI era.

The proposition:

The future of work has a body.
Body Forward exists to make sure we design for it.

Team & collaborators

Manoush Zomorodi

Host, NPR’s “TED Radio Hour”;
Author, Body Electric

Brian Elliot

CEO, Work Forward;
Executive in Residence, Charter

Melissa Painter