Leveraging AI means acclimatizing to a new landscape, from navigating the fear of job displacement to educating yourself with technology. The good news? AI can unlock lucrative possibilities in corporate real estate, boosting operational efficiency and enhancing workplace experience along the way.
We’ve all witnessed the advanced progress of AI over the last couple of years. ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, and its capabilities have grown exponentially.
But don’t be afraid. AI isn’t going to take your job (just yet).
AI isn’t a replacement for people; it doesn’t know anything about your culture or the employees you work with every day. People should understand that this is a tool, first and foremost, not a magic wand that will solve every problem for everybody.
So now that you know it’s not replacing you, you can capitalize on it augmenting you. Harnessing AI can make your job that much easier so that you can make powerful changes in your organization.
Workplace professionals and CRE teams can adapt to and make the most of the changing landscape in various ways. Let’s dig into the details.
Ready for the future? How to leverage AI in the workplace
AI offers a huge opportunity for CRE, but you won’t reap the rewards until you figure out how to get data into a private system for AI to ingest. Think of it like making wine or beer. You need to add your own sugars for the culture to grow.
Workplace and facilities folks need to understand how AI works and how important their specific data is if they want to leverage AI in their workplace. So, educate yourself on technology; we need to develop more of what Gartner calls digital dexterity, or as I call it, tech savviness.
Leverage the apps available in your workplace or enterprise environment and learn more about what opportunities they provide. Be open to learning; people need to try to see the possibilities and embrace the opportunities rather than hiding in fear and putting their heads in the sand. If you want to prepare for the future, step up and show your managers and leaders that you’re curious, willing to learn, and not afraid.
So, how are your peers harnessing AI? Where are the gaps in the market?
Prediction and prevention: AI in operational efficiency
In workplace facilities, people spend time, energy, and effort on repetitive tasks. There are floor walks to see what’s working, what needs servicing, what’s in good condition, and what potentially needs a work order or future maintenance. But AI brings the possibility of preventative and predictive maintenance.
An example of AI for operational efficiency is smart building tech IoT sensors. Many companies have embraced this, but they’re relatively new and create a lot of noise. If you look at the current health status of any one of these IoT systems, you’ll find blinking red lights everywhere. This can become overwhelming. AI will come into its own in the workplace context when it can curate the data by filtering out the noise and helping you focus on what’s important.
Ultimately, AI will help teams do more with less. One workplace professional might be able to manage a portfolio that’s 10 times bigger than their current one because they’re being augmented with AI and leveraging all that data.
Breaking down silos: Harnessing AI with strategic thinking
Every company I’ve interacted with, big and small, faces the same challenges and has the same day-to-day issues.
Companies are often fragmented by geography. They might be doing amazing things to help run their workplaces for their teams, but their New York team uses a different tool set than their team in London. Instead, they should consider combining all this data to elevate the efficiency of the entire corporate real estate team.
The trouble is that many prop-tech firms target niche problems. They don’t step back and consider how their solution fits into the overall CRE landscape. It’s all about looking at the bigger picture.
In fact, one of the biggest opportunities with CRE is for teams to think more strategically. Nobody is providing a strategic vision, roadmap, or five-year plan for how they’ll use technology, so teams chase their own agendas. We’re very much working in silos. This results in a hodgepodge of systems that overlap, causing a lot of duplication.
Qualitative data: The key to portfolio optimization and workplace experience
Elevating the workplace experience depends on data; however, we should start and end with qualitative sentiment data. So, where do you draw the line in terms of how much data you can access and leverage to provide an optimal workplace experience?
You need to know what employees do and who they should meet regularly to provide an optimum in-person workplace experience.
Sure, we can use occupancy sensors to see whether an open collaboration space is used or how people use individual workstations. But there’s a limit to how much you can improve the workplace experience without having more information about the work that people are actually doing.
That’s where you run into challenges. CRE teams are normally part of the CFO organization or part of the People and Places organization, but they operate as a service to provide space for people when they decide to come to the office.
Whether it’s a desk, phone room, meeting room, or social space, you just make sure that there’s space. You don’t need to know their jobs, what they’re doing every day, or what their contribution to the company’s goals and objectives is. It doesn’t matter to you. You just make sure there’s space, and I think there’s a huge gap here.
There’s a real need for a big change in thinking and breaking away from these silos.
How to design the best space to get the job done using AI
Before you start building or designing space in the workplace, consider its purpose. Why would people come together in real life, in person, instead of just working virtually or digitally?
Thinking about it in the context of ‘jobs to be done’ helps you determine the most appropriate space for them to be successful in that job.
Start building a master data model with “jobs to be done,” people, technology, and spaces. Then, you can train your AI with real specific context around your company, what your teams are doing, what business outcomes you’re looking for, and what technology you have. This will help inform what kind of spaces you should provide to your teams.
AI can process all that data much faster than having teams of analysts sifting through and trying to find patterns and figure out optimal workplace designs. I should just be able to say: here’s what I think the optimal workplace design is for this specific team to accomplish these outcomes or to get these jobs done.
How AI will shape the workplace over the next decade (and beyond)
Let’s gaze into a crystal ball at the future of AI and CRE technology.
The workplace is going to change. Corporate real estate leaders will be challenged to do more with less and use AI to help optimize their space so that they only deliver what they need, when they need it, to those who need it.
But this is an opportunity. AI will enable teams to design flexible workspaces that reconfigure according to the needs of the next people entering the space and can be leveraged to create more space for busy times and shrink it when it’s quieter.
You put in what you need, and the AI will determine your ideal space based on your input.
Conclusion: How to keep up with your peers who use AI
Some companies have been more successful than others in transforming the management of real estate portfolios and there’s still a lot of opportunity to augment manual processes in the pre-design phase through technology.
It’s easy to get sucked into figuring out how to use “shiny objects” in your organization. But without connecting to the bigger picture of your corporate real estate portfolio, you won’t get the transformation you really want.
So, if you want to keep up with your peers, get educated and explore opportunities for integrating technology into their pre-design activities to improve efficiency and drive innovation. See the opportunities in CRE and harness them, like operational efficiency and workplace optimization, and break free from the silos and think strategically. That’s where you’ll get ahead of the game (and your peers).
Want to inject the power of technology into your portfolio optimization while elevating workplace experience? Start by taking an incremental approach to accommodate hybrid working.
About the author
As a seasoned expert in corporate real estate technology, Martin Byrne specializes in exploring the intersection of real estate and cutting-edge tech. With a keen eye on innovation, he delves into how artificial intelligence, data analytics, and digital transformation are reshaping the landscape of corporate real estate. Martin’s insights offer a deep dive into the tools and strategies that drive efficiency, enhance decision-making, and forecast trends within the industry. His writing aims to empower real estate professionals with the knowledge to navigate the evolving digital terrain and leverage technology for competitive advantage.
Martin now runs his own consultancy. Prior to consulting, Martin worked at Salesforce and Gap Inc.
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