In the past year or so, it’s been hard to avoid headlines about the transformative impact of AI on the world of work.
Hardly a day goes by without discussions of the impact of increased automation on how we work and if we work, but debates around how this technological revolution impacts our place of work have been far less prominent.
But AI and tech are already making a tangible difference in our workplaces – both to employee experience and behind the scenes. While generative AI has a role to play, the bulk of this change is driven by wider technological advances.
These changes begin with your arrival at the office. Gone are the days of rummaging around your pockets or bag for an office pass; instead, in our buildings we can now offer contactless navigation from street to desk, all via a smartphone, including visitor access.
In practice this means that through our partnership with Smart Spaces we have integrated Apple Wallet functionality and wearables with our access control systems, meaning you can get through the security gates using your smart watch or phone just the same as if you were making a contactless purchase. Our One Bartholomew building was one of the first workspaces in Europe to offer this technology, and it’s now in place at The JJ Mack Building and The Kensington Building too, as we roll it out across our portfolio.
It's not the end of our ambitions in this space either. We foresee that one day the credential stored in the phone will move to ultra-wideband, meaning that as long as your phone is on your person or in your bag the doors will slide open, meaning no more juggling of papers and bags while you try to unlock your phone.
This exemplifies our ethos to embed technology that makes the everyday more efficient, which is less visible but just as important to the operation of our buildings. Here we are working with Bueno to revolutionise our analytics and automate building operations by using AI, eliminating both labour and expertise barriers that would normally slow down this process.
Through AI-powered onboarding we have been able to deploy our buildings and get the analytics running much more quickly than the standard process. With tens of thousands of data points all needing to be manually checked, this process used to take months, but now through machine learning we have been able to get our building operations up and running in 30 days, enabling rapid expansion of these high-speed analytics across our portfolio.
It's not just about speed either, but enabling a shift from reactive to proactive. Not only can we create bespoke rules that are tailored to our specific performance needs and goals, but the AI-assisted predictive models can even detect early signs of failure on physical systems such as HVAC. This enables proactive maintenance to ensure systems are fully functioning and as energy efficient as possible, as well as extending asset life.
We are also using the Space Agent now in operation from Smart Spaces, a semi-autonomous AI that can control various systems within our buildings. This means our occupiers can ask the app any kind of query, perhaps about the office temperature or booking a meeting room, and the app has full autonomy to assist – so it can create a visitor pass, book a desk, or adjust the heating or lighting etc. This is implemented through the bespoke building app and digital twin of the building, fed in through a Large Language Model (LLM) API that’s similar to ChatGPT, meaning it does an incredible job of translating whatever is spoken to it and putting this into action instantly and seamlessly.
It can do this by interacting with the existing digital twin models of our buildings, which are available through our building apps and provide visibility and control to building management, tenant occupiers and individual users. On-floor lighting, heating and cooling can all be controlled remotely through the Space Agent, granting precise and immediate environmental control to tenants and individuals.
The question we are most asked by our occupiers is how many people are in the office, to help them work out their office space requirements. As a result we have installed improved smart sensors in our buildings that enable better space optimisation and monitoring of desk availability. These sensors will also determine if a room has been misbooked too, so if no-one turns up it can release the room and make it available again – all autonomously.
These smart sensors also feed into the digital twin of the building, meaning that you can see how busy each area of the building is and its environmental values, including noise levels and temperature. This is perfect for determining where you’d like to work, whether that’s for collaborative work or heads-down concentration, or which area has the temperature just right.
Users can even opt-in to have their live location displayed, so that their team members know where they are in the building. This has been particularly popular among big multinationals in large offices, where team members who might be based in multiple locations need to make the most of the time when they are physically present.
Ignore the hype and headlines, and it’s clear that advances in tech and AI have led to substantial improvements to offices. Making the workplace experience very different to even ten years ago, these have empowered building managers to reduce costs, drive energy efficiency and improve sustainability credentials. And looking ahead to the next ten years (or even sooner), we’re now getting closer to buildings being able to self-optimise. Instead of the verbal prompts currently required they will soon become fully autonomous, freeing up office and facilities managers from routine tasks and marking the next step in the digital transformation of the office.