International. "Almost all building systems have implications for productivity in physical offices and all systems can benefit from a layer of artificial intelligence (AI) over their processes. Greater intelligence about air quality, temperature and lighting, for example, leads to greater occupant comfort and therefore productivity. Using AI for access, security, cybersecurity, and predictive maintenance, meanwhile, reduces disruptions to support productivity. Even AI energy management, while reducing costs, creates greener buildings that increase loyalty and attract better talent, which in turn increases productivity," reads the recent Memoori article on adopting smart workplaces across various commercial building verticals.
There is no doubt that artificial intelligence will revolutionize the workplace, bringing unprecedented safety, efficiency and productivity to organizations. The real question is how we got from here to that artificially intelligent future of work. Today, we are going through a huge disruption in the workplace, as the pandemic has prevented workers from going to their offices for much of the past 18 months, the rise of remote work is driving the consolidation of office space, and the inevitable post-COVID economic situation. The recession is creating budget constraints.
At the same time, companies are beginning to understand that smart building technology offers the best opportunity to overcome challenges and return employees to the workplace safely.
While AI has developed slowly over decades, recent technological advances and massive disruption caused by the pandemic have completely changed the landscape of offices. Cloud computing is in place, big data is becoming more established, connectivity is reaching new heights, our journey to smart workplaces is now restarting with the significant challenges of the new normal. Office owners and operators face two opposing forces, the temporary need for more space to enable social distancing and the potentially long-term implications of remote work reducing space requirements in physical offices. To navigate this new landscape, your buildings must be smart and smart.
"Surveys that seek to understand likely future work patterns as we emerge from the clutches of the pandemic have yielded wildly different conclusions about what companies should expect in terms of space demand, depending on the audience, the country, and the time the survey was conducted. occurred during the course of the pandemic," explains our new AI & Machine Learning in Smart Commercial Buildings report. To support the overall transition to hybrid work, executives around the world are planning for greater investment in new tools to better understand occupancy requirements, as well as IT infrastructure to ensure virtual connectivity."
Smart technology in the form of occupancy analytics provides the essential data for AI-enabled analytics to make sense of and gain actionable insights from the smart workplace. The complexity of this new landscape demands additional intelligence, but AI isn't just a route to getting employees back to work safely. The real benefits are much longer-term, as AI promises to improve workplaces in a wide range of different ways, from the tangible impacts of efficiency, safety and occupancy analysis, to the unknown influence of robotics and augmented reality, across a world of applications yet to be imagined.
"Greater success at work will come when organizations leverage humans, along with AI, to drive an improved experience in the moments that matter most. It's those interactions at the moment where the new wave of opportunity emerges," Josh Feast, CEO and co-founder of Boston-based artificial intelligence company Cogito. This consideration requires an open mind, active optimism and empathy to see the full potential of the human-AI relationship. I think this is where human-conscious technology can play an important role in shaping the future."
AI greatly divides opinions, from doomsayers who predict ai will overthrow humanity to those who see it as humanity's savior in almost every aspect of society. In the workplace, one of the main themes of opposition to AI revolves around the theme of invoking jobs, where concerns arise about the pressure on people replaced by AI and the impact of job losses on society as a whole. There is no doubt that AI will replace certain forms of human labor but, as with automation, there are limits to what the technology can do, and evidence suggests that AI has a long way to go before solving certain key human characteristics.
* An analysis by Memoori.
