Artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of building automation systems for years, but the rise of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT has many FMs wondering what’s next. IFMA’s latest report, Gamechanger: A Facility Manager’s Guide to Building a Relationship with AI, released just before World Workplace 2024, presents a roadmap for facility professionals to understand and utilize AI-powered tools.
At the 2024 IFMA World Workplace Conference & Expo, a panel built on the lessons of Gamechanger to tackle thorny questions related to AI in FM. Moderated by Dean Stanberry, past chair of the IFMA Global Board of Directors, the panel featured:
- Dr. Jake Smithwick, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
- Dr. Dipin Kasana, director of business analytics for JLL
- Dr. Mahnaz Ensafi, application manager for Planon
- Dr. Matt Tucker, IFMA’s director of research
The panel yielded thought-provoking takeaways that included:
1. Higher education must start preparing FM students now for the evolving technological landscape they’ll face.
It’s likely that incoming FMs rely on generative AI, augmented AI, and other tools, but not for the reasons you might think, noted Smithwick.
“After COVID-19, in the built environment, we lost about 1 million workers in the workforce. Within a short amount of time after we opened back up, about 500,000 folks came back,” Smithwick explained. “Of all the people who came back into the workforce after leaving, who were they? Were they the same people who left? No. They’re younger and newer. Their skills are less.”
People who were already on the verge of retirement left during the early days of COVID and never came back, Smithwick said. In addition, low birth rates mean that there will be fewer people around to replace older workers, and FM will be competing with every other industry for the same few people. FM staffs are likely to shrink as a result. Higher education institutions can prepare their FM students for this by teaching them how to use AI like they would use any other tool—it can help organize data, augment their existing knowledge, and more.
“The cat is out of the bag,” Smithwick said. “It’s part of reality. We do them a disservice if we’re not teaching our students to maximize those technologies in our everyday work.”
2. Property technologies, or proptech, driven by AI are already reshaping traditional FM operations like building automation and security management.
AI isn’t perfect, but it’s good at performing analytics and automating many routine tasks, Kasana explained. Some of these include:
- Streamlining work orders. “From my perspective, our goal is not to replace humans with anything. Our goal is to provide them with a tool that allows them to focus on what they were hired to do and what they’re good at,” Kasana said. “Take an electrician who is focused on doing electrical work. We want him to focus on that and not work order documentation. Some of these decisions can not only be automated but also optimized. Then people don’t have to focus on these mundane tasks.”
- Space utilization. Facilities have all kinds of different occupancy levels and layouts. AI can help you optimize the way you use space.
- Lease management. “We have folks who do hundreds and thousands of pages of leases, and it’s a very mundane task,” Kasana said. “You can use generative AI applications where you upload these documents, summarize them, and do benchmarking.”
- Health and safety. “We have sensors everywhere nowadays to measure air quality and other parameters,” Kasana said. Artificial intelligence can help sort through these streams of data to identify threats.
“There’s an exhibitor here who was demonstrating one of their tools that does routing for technicians,” Stanberry added. “They had a model that would do first in, first out scheduling and it would schedule five stops for a technician based on that model. Using AI and optimizing it, they were able to change the route of where they were going and went from five to seven stops. That’s revenue and optimal maintenance—getting things done faster. If we’re not going to have enough people, how do we make use of the people we will have?”
3. Change management will be crucial to ensure a smooth and successful deployment of AI tools in facility management.
People use AI tools such as Siri and Alexa frequently in their personal lives, but integrating AI into their professional lives feels different. Change management will be critical to equipping people with AI tools that can help them do their jobs, the panel noted.
“The most important thing is to plan ahead of time and be ready for that change,” said Ensafi. “Planning starts with defining your business goal, and that’s very important. What do you have? What’s your pain point? What are your business goals? Is it productivity, or are you trying to reduce costs? Look at how AI can help with that. Maybe it can identify patterns in your utility usage.”
Preparing for the change also must include two key concepts—data governance and AI governance, Ensafi added. Data governance refers to the quality of your data, which must be clean and consistently collected. “You can’t just pick up any data and connect it for any business goal,” she said. “You need data that’s related to what you’re looking at, and you can’t just use any AI model and apply it to any type of data.”
AI governance is about making sure your AI tool is drawing its conclusions from a diverse enough set of data. “Think about using AI to help you select a vendor for your tasks that are coming up,” Ensafi said. “What happens if your AI is always favoring one vendor over others? Is that helping your business? You need diverse data to remove those biases, and that’s why you need tons of clean, clear, consistent, and relevant data.”
After you choose your AI model and your data is ready to roll, “you need to educate your people,” Ensafi added. “They’re going to use it, so they need to be able to understand its capabilities and the capabilities of other tools. Maybe they use it and come back to you with suggestions. You need to educate them over time before you start applying it, so they’ll be ready.” Start small and implement AI gradually, Ensafi suggested—that will allow you to see whether the tool needs improvement or even replacement.
“We all hate change management every now and then, but I’ll tell you what it isn’t—sending an email with what the changes are going to be,” Kasana said. “It’s a process that applies multiple strategies coming together and helping you get from your initial state to your desired final stage. You have to be agile and flexible with your strategies.”
