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The Workplace Futures Conference 2025 explored FM & AI: everything you need to know which included the question, is the sector building its digital future on weak foundations? Sara Bean reports
With AI now everywhere you look, this year’s Workplace Futures Conference turned its attentions to the impact it could have on the facilities management sector. Being the Futures conference however, the organisers were not afraid, as Chair Simone Fenton-Jarvis described it, to “lob in a few grenades”.
Following on from some solid opening sessions on setting business goals and positive ways AI can support those with disabilities, came a reality check. Baskar Sundaram, CEO at Baachu, sales and market development specialists for the UK FM market, asked when it comes to FM and AI: are we building on broken foundations? Baachu’s market research on the sector has tracked financial instability, AI, and rates of technology adoption. The findings are sobering, including that just eight per cent of Top 80 UK FM firms have structured, centralised data at all levels, commercial value of FM contracts have fallen to 0.3 from 1.0 in 2015 and most frontline FM workers identify more with the client than their own employer. Sundaram pondered, “if we can’t even manage basic asset data, how can we talk about AI and predictive maintenance?”
His warning that AI is far from a panacea for every problem was echoed throughout the day. JLL Technologies’ Andrew Targell, cautioned against building a spanking new AI edifice on top of shaky foundations. Don’t be distracted he said by all the sellers, the vendors and everyone else trying to sell you a tool, focus on what is the business problem you want to address. Go to market and look at the solutions out there and ask them to demonstrate how they can fix your problem, because only then have you got a valid business case.
HUMAN ELEMENT
As was discussed at last year’s event, all this new tech doesn’t lessen the need for the human touch and several speakers drew out that theme. Yvonne Luu of social purpose consultancy Purpose Union warned of AI bias in areas such as hiring and recruitment due to problems such as ‘algorithmic bias’. This is why it’s important to focus on the people who use these AI tools she said. “No matter how helpful, you still need humans to be reviewing output, because if you solely rely on the output of AI, you’re setting yourself up for some big risks.”
Steve McGregor of DMA Group painted a picture of an industry in transition in his session Can AI tolerate the complexities of FM? The adoption of AI is not a short fix, he said and will take a lot of hard work and investment. Importantly he added it won’t as some have warned, take away jobs. “This is not about losing jobs, it is about how we get fewer people to do more. It brings with it a massive democratic shift, and it will upturn and upend the economic models of most of the first world economies.”
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
It’s estimated that there are over 500 AI-enabled workplace tools, available, so a useful set of sessions looked at the practical ways AI can help enhance FM performance. One notable area is in security and Andy Schofield of Reliance High Tech said AI can help deliver some impressive results. For example, the longer a human being views a camera feed the more likely they are to miss significant developments, but ‘AI agents’ will be able to review the footage and flag up any unusual behaviours.
According to James Bradley of Churchill, AI is being used in his organisation to improve internal communications, for instance enabling frontline staff to report safety near misses in their own language. While he said they are also deploying AI solutions to customers across leisure, business services, social housing and food transport, he stressed: “This absolutely does not replace the people side of our business, it just helps us get even better results which enables people to spend better quality time together.”
Mining the data was the other key theme of the day, as there’s no point in producing realms of information if it’s not been properly applied. In a panel discussion on the topic, Ryan Stocks and Andre Bothma of Bellrock explained how people and AI can work in symphony to deliver enhanced building experiences. From an asset manager perspective, building managers and service engineers can access data in ways they could not previously. The data analysis can then provide information on comfort levels, energy maintenance and predict the future performance of assets. This helps reduce the number of reactive works, whether a lift, plant equipment or HVAC system giving FMs the means to better forecast their maintenance budgets.
As Graham Woods of ISS summed up in his presentation: “AI isn’t a tool on its own right. It is there to enhance what we already have, to drive value and add innovation.”
