Kelby Green, CTO, VergeSense, says that data-driven insights are a boost to workplace teams seeing rapid changes in work.

Marketing is fully remote, but accounting is in the office. Design and engineering have a hybrid policy but have trouble finding space to work together when they are in. Ghosted reservations are frustrating everyone. Do we need more space—or less?

In actuality, this problem has become even more nuanced, and the answer is both—you might be having a problem with conference room availability, with certain conference rooms constantly in use and others rarely used. These are some of the daily challenges for operations and real estate teams; the work environment may look the same as it did a few years ago, but work itself has changed. To better accommodate expectations and employee preferences, they must adapt the workspace.

Working side-by-side with customers using occupancy intelligence in their workplaces, our business has seen an evolution in needs. Initially, organizations wanted current data to help them look forward, not back. Armed with numbers, leaders then wanted insights hidden within the troves of data. Check.

Now, we’re at a point where leaders need support to guide their most impactful optimization decisions—and they need it fast to respond to a changing workforce, shifting preferences in working styles, and keep employees happy in a battle for talent.

This is where the power of AI can help.

Performing a task that would otherwise require human intelligence, AI helps with the challenges in the decision-making process in two ways: By automating and improving manual data analysis processes for occupancy data, and accelerating analysis to support the productivity of workplace teams.

AI is no longer a futuristic concept—it's a present reality reshaping workplaces worldwide. Early adopters are positioning themselves ahead of the curve, gaining a competitive edge. Those who fall behind on this trend miss a critical opportunity for improvement and growth.

According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, 75% of knowledge workers use AI today, and 46% started within the last six months. It’s early days, but anecdotal results suggest AI saves time and is a force multiplier, unlike anything business has seen since the Industrial Revolution.

For enterprises struggling with complex questions about evolving today's workplace to support hybrid ways of working, AI has arrived just in the nick of time, and with all the right capabilities to walk into the office and make a big splash:

  • Focused: AI tools like ChatGPT are generalists. They are good at searching, listening, and summarizing but lack the specialized knowledge industries like corporate real estate need. Now, next-generation AI tools are available that are tailored for the industry. These new models are trained with real estate terminology, key concepts around capacity, occupancy, and usage, and specialized expertise that makes them ideal for use with workplace data.
  • Flexible: AI has become more flexible, increasing its ability to pull data from many sources, integrate data sets, and use unstructured data, like employee feedback or cost per square foot, to return more specific answers. Access to the technology is also becoming democratized as it is no longer limited to development or data science teams and is integrated across tools teams rely on every day.
  • Speed and Scale: AI can analyze vast amounts of data, enabling workplace teams to be more efficient by reducing the time and manual effort required to analyze occupancy data. AI’s data processing speed frees analysts to experiment and iterate more— allowing them to capitalize on opportunities and respond to feedback op for changes.

The value of AI lies in how it pushes our thinking beyond the data. If you only have occupancy data, it’s difficult to tell a story or gain insights. There are numbers but no correlation or context. Using AI to integrate many data sources provides a more complete picture, allowing teams to actually make decisions. Now, they can tell that conference rooms are being underutilized and would be better reconfigured as collaboration space, or that few employees are using their desk space for actual work.

Perhaps most tantalizing for our industry is the very real possibility that AI will help us find the panacea for post-pandemic work: solutions for workspaces that are cost-effective, efficient and enhance both employee satisfaction and productivity. Now, that would truly be revolutionary.