Esme Banks Marr on the new role for place intelligence

Every senior job title in this industry used to make some sense: head of real estate investment, portfolio manager, workplace strategist. You knew roughly what someone did before you’d even shaken their hand. Artificial intelligence (AI) has now changed that.

We need to create a new role; if we don’t, someone else – probably a tech company – will do it for us. And so I give you the place intelligence officer: someone who decides what a building is allowed to know about the people in it, who owns that knowledge and what it is for.

As far as I can tell, this job does not yet exist. Buildings have been quietly filling up with data, all of it collected by someone, somewhere. And all this usually takes place without anyone senior enough knowing what to do with that data to learn anything that will make a difference.

Our industry has spent decades designing offices and commercial buildings around an average employee who does not exist. Everyone is largely given the same desk depth, lighting levels and acoustic treatment, whether it is the more introverted person tucked in the corner or the person who thinks best pacing the length of a breakout space.

Used properly, AI could let a building respond to the actual person walking through the door rather than a hypothetical ‘average’ one. This represents a major shift whereby a building starts behaving less like a fixed asset and more like something with a memory – one that notices how a space performs and adjusts in real time, rather than filing the problem away for the next fit-out in seven years’ time.

None of that works if we keep the silos we’ve always had with fund manager, agent, landlord and facility manager, as well as architect and engineer, not talking to each other with any urgency – or rather, with urgency but not enough weight to be listened to. AI cuts straight across every single one of these disciplines, which is precisely why nobody currently owns the problem, and possibly why so much of the AI-in-buildings conversation lives on a conference stage rather than on an actual floorplate. Intelligent building systems still need that judgement call from a human with real authority, not a dashboard.

The problem is also reinforced by the way we procure. Asset owners commission a project, appoint consultants and contractors to tightly defined scopes and buy a suite of ‘smart’ technologies; then, at practical completion, the funding stops. Post-occupancy evaluation rarely happens, technology starts ageing from day one and much of the knowledge gained during delivery walks out the door with the project team.

Shift more of this to operational expenditure and subscription-based services and the incentives would change: systems stay current, lessons are captured, procurement becomes less repetitive and organisations stop rebuilding intelligence from scratch on every project.