Melissa Marsh, CEO and Founder of PLASTARC, spoke at the latest rendition of International Facility Management Association’s (IFMA) annual World Workplace Conference and Expo, which was held at San Antonio’s Henry B. González Convention Center. Since 1995, the conference has offered a forum for leaders across industries to exchange groundbreaking ideas on facilities management (FM) and built environments. Featuring educational speeches, keynote addresses, and presentations on cutting-edge workplace technologies, the conference advocated various methods for fostering happier, healthier, more resilient workplaces. Some of its most prominent topics included:

• The integration of cloud-based tools to facilitate connectivity and flexibility.
• The use of workplace sensors to understand how occupants interact with their workspaces, and the ways those spaces can be adjusted to meet their needs.
• Data-driven methods for meeting efficiency and sustainability benchmarks.

Marsh’s presentation, titled “Revolutionize FM with AI: Crafting Next-Gen Employee Experience,” specifically explored the ways in which artificial intelligence can be leveraged to study a building’s occupancy and usage patterns in conjunction with user experiences, and how the insights generated can be used to cultivate a healthier, happier workplace.

Though we often think of AI as a very recent innovation, its evolution and its role in architecture have spanned several decades. Marsh explained how this moment, in which large language models have unlocked the generative potential of AI, is the culmination of many developmental stages; from the founding of IBM in 1911 to the advent of neural networks and the internet in the 1980s, corporations and governments have been incrementally building the technological infrastructure that enables AI as we currently know it.

Similarly, Marsh observed, AI had already played a major role in architecture over the years. The introduction of CAD programs in the 1980s and GIS in the 1990s enabled architects and designers to incorporate building performance characteristics, including stresses, loads, and weight-bearing, into their models, which could be used for predictive purposes.

Marsh was quick to qualify all of this by reminding attendees that AI has never been, and never will be, a panacea. “This isn’t about human intelligence or artificial intelligence – it’s about what we can do together,” she said. “AI isn't a solution unto itself. It's a way for you to amplify your capabilities as you serve up data about your organization in new and compelling ways.”

She explained how the more contemporary forms of artificial intelligence are being used to create more customizable work environments. By compiling a building’s occupancy and utilization patterns over time and using artificial intelligence to synthesize and analyze the data, facilities managers can fine-tune countless aspects of their operations. If, for instance, an analysis demonstrates that rainier days tend to bring significantly lower occupancy rates, it might be wise to input 10-day weather forecasts into an LLM that can then calibrate the daily food and beverage plan to minimize waste. AI’s ability to convert large-scale observations into context-specific predictions, Marsh emphasized, is one of its greatest attributes.

The prevalence of smartphones and smart buildings are a major part of this, since they’ve rendered the “breadcrumbs of human behavior” – data on where, when, and how people use built environments – more attainable than ever before. By maximizing the use of sensors and IoT technologies, facilities managers can attain a more holistic understanding of users’ needs and preferences. This, however, is largely dependent on the implementation of Activity-Based Working (ABW) principles in the office. “When we give people choice and control over where, when, and how they work, and track that information, we give them the opportunity to participate with us and give us feedback. People with choices are an excellent source of workplace intelligence,” Marsh said. If users are simply assigned desks, facilities managers lose the opportunity to observe and learn from workers’ everyday choices.

Perhaps the most valuable asset in this entire process is an effective combination of quantitative and anecdotal feedback. If, for instance, a user is not happy about a space’s acoustics, they can use their smartphone to both measure the room’s decibel level and report their dissatisfaction. In conjunction, these two data points paint a clear picture that the facilities manager can use for future space planning.

Similarly, a building’s occupancy and usage patterns could be illuminated by asking a front desk person for their observations on what spatial factors elicit the strongest responses – whether favorable or critical – from occupants. By strategically collecting this information and entering it into large language models, organizations can quickly synthesize these datasets into informative, actionable insights, and those insights can be used to treat buildings more like software than hardware, insofar as they can be easily updated to better serve each occupant.

Though IFMA represents the vanguard of facilities management, a poll of the room helped demonstrate how adoption of artificial intelligence in the sector still has a long way to go; Only half of attendees reported strong adoption of AI to enhance employees’ spatial experience. Marsh’s final call-to-action affirmed that the question is not whether facilities managers will use AI on a wider scale, but when: “We have the opportunity to ask people what they want, track what they choose to do, and bring those pieces together to serve up a workplace experience that’s superior to what we’ve had in the past.”