AI Enables Managers To Solve Real-World Challenges

It has been 15 years since IBM’s supercomputer Watson won on Jeopardy! and a little more than three years since ChatGPT made its public debut. While artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for over 70 years, these more recent demonstrations have captured the general public’s attention. In just a few years, AI has seemingly entered nearly every aspect of our lives. 

At industry conferences, it has moved from a niche topic to a major theme, and in the last year, the focus has shifted from chatbots to AI agents. This shift has opened newer, more promising possibilities for maintenance and engineering managers in institutional and commercial facilities to engage with AI to help with the ongoing and critical business of facility operations and maintenance. 

Embracing AI’s possibilities 

While much of the discussion of AI’s impact on facilities has been broad and future-focused, the technology already is enabling managers and their teams to address and solve real-world, front-line challenges facing facilities. 

There are a lot of opportunities in facilities-related technician trades. The industry does not have enough qualified technicians entering the trades to meet facilities’ needs, and facilities are suffering. Teams need help, and AI can enhance technicians’ capabilities in many ways, including these: 

• Provide quick access to references and resources. AI can identify equipment and pull up operations and maintenance manuals for ready reference. 
• Identify training resources including short videos that can help technicians research issues and solve specific problems as they encounter them. 
• Help triage customer complaints and system failures, suggesting possible courses of action. 
• Capture system histories to identify failure risks. 
• Create technician notes from verbal reports. 

AI tools make information easier to access, and they focus efforts, amplifying the teams’ capabilities. 

Promoting workplace safety, comfort, and health. Facilities personnel are guardians of organizations and the people in them, whether the facilities are courthouses, libraries, hospitals offices, manufacturing plants or research labs. AI is being employed in a variety of ways across the industry to help managers and technicians meet operational goals related to these critical priorities: 

• Workplace safety. The most important charge for facility managers is keeping people safe. While safety has many facets, the area where AI is being significantly employed for safety purposes is physical security. Surveillance and video analytics have grown by leaps and bounds, allowing cameras to be more so much more than passive monitoring devices. Analytics can recognize and distinguish objects, movements and sounds, which can proactively alert facilities teams to potential threats. Access control systems can better detect tailgating and perimeter encroachment. They can also detect human behaviors and track access patterns to flag anomalies and delay access. Deterrence strategies such as sound alarms, lights and messages can be deployed when analytics detect anomalies. 
• Occupant comfort. Comfort can mean a lot of things in a facility, including thermal, visual and acoustic, and they are all important. Every manager knows that the number one complaint in facilities involves too-hot or too-cold calls. Can AI help? Absolutely. Using predictive control algorithms and sensor data, AI can monitor weather patterns, monitor occupancy changes and learn equipment response times to adjust temperatures to respond to predicted needs rather than reacting to an in-the-moment space temperature that is too high or too low. This allows systems to proactively meet occupants’ thermal comfort needs and not waste energy on unoccupied spaces. 
• Health. Following the pandemic and wildfires of the last several years, managers have become much more conscious of indoor air quality (IAQ) and its impact on human health. Poor IAQ is correlated with stuffy feeling spaces, headaches, fatigue and respiratory issues. Using sensors, technicians can monitor outdoor and indoor air metrics, such as temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds and tiny particulate matter. Using AI analytics, systems can adjust outside air levels to maintain IAQ levels while also balancing energy efficiency.

Laurie Gilmer is president and chief operating officer of FEA. She is past chair of IFMA’s Global Board of Directors and serves on the National Alliance for High-Performance Building Operations leadership team.

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