Skip to content
Where tech meets people: How Mitie uses AI to support our experts
As AI plays an ever-growing role in all areas of facilities management, we look at how Mitie plans to use it to support its People function and strategy – providing intelligence services to those at the company’s core.
By Jasmine Hudson
AI is transforming industries across the board, and over the next few years it will indelibly leave its mark on the world of facilities management.
For many, this change is one full of opportunity. For others, it leaves room for unknowns. Fears around jobs being replaced by machines are a common feature of today’s workplace. Which is why it’s vital to remember that as much as AI will change our world of work, it will never supplant the people at its heart.
At Mitie, our approach to our facilities management has seen us combine human experts with innovative technologies for years – and we see AI as an extension of that. As much as technology can help automate and streamline the services we provide, its sole purpose should be to augment the human touch that delights our customers and helps us exceed expectations.
For that reason, any deployment of AI for facilities management must be done with an eye to enabling people; helping them to work more efficiently, become more informed and elevate their own expertise. A key part of our People Strategy at Mitie is to apply AI to help our people upskill and progress their careers, so we can provide a new level of service.
Here’s how we’re doing it…
Identifying opportunities for employee support
The most important role of any People function is to support employees with a top-class employee experience. At Mitie we have around 72,000 colleagues – which can mean thousands of queries coming in every day, from requests for training to payslip queries.
One of the major strengths of AI is its ability to parse huge amounts of information and identify patterns within it, delivering data-driven business intelligence to decision makers. Which makes it the perfect tool for helping us minimise the labour requirement of answering these queries.
We plan to use AI to establish a knowledge base that can identify the questions we’ve already answered and deliver those answers to our people through an intuitive chatbot. This will make information easier and faster to find for our employees, while also reducing duplicated effort and freeing our teams for more value-adding work.
This is far from the only use case, though. AI’s ability to analyse data at scale can help us gain numerous critical insights – into performance, scheduling, skills gaps, attrition and other factors that help us serve our employees better.
One example is helping us to analyse our annual employee survey, which sees tens of thousands of responses provide a window into attitudes to work, areas in need of improvement and what our people on the ground need most. Again, gaining these insights manually is incredibly time-consuming and expensive, so AI can not only save us time here, but also help us identify and respond to the most pressing employee needs in a more agile way.
We can understand the top measures our managers should focus on, where issues like absences, low engagement and attrition exist within the company, and which areas of our workforce need upskilling. And the sooner we can see these patterns, the sooner we can address them.
Providing opportunities to upskill our experts
One of the major talking points around AI is the idea that the technology will replace people. But we to prefer to think of it as a tool for improving what people are capable of – and therefore helping us all drive true facilities transformation for our clients. This is called “Human-in-the-Loop” AI. But for it to work, we need to be sure that we are giving people the skills they need to work alongside our technology.
To this end, we’re getting ready to formally launch our Digital Academy. This will ensure everyone at Mitie has an element of digital literacy, can work with emerging tech and knows how protect themselves and the business from any unfamiliar dangers – like cyberthreats.
The programme isn’t just a “tech 101” course, though. It goes beyond that to give people the skills they need to earn more money and progress their careers. The Digital Academy will see us expand our Microsoft Co-Pilot licences to 3,000 users, it will include the recruitment of an AI Blackbelt to lead Mitie’s AI charge and it will see us open more Data Analytics apprenticeships.
In a world where AI can be used to increasingly take on repeatable, time-consuming jobs, it’s important that we look at what that means for our experts. In our mind, AI should be a tool that helps aid progression, leaving room for people to follow career paths, learn new abilities and fill higher-skilled roles.
This is how AI can help us grow and progress, both as individuals and as a company. We see it as an investment in people, and it’s vital that everyone feels empowered by it, from those on the front line to our sector specialists.
Our next steps
Over the next three years or so, we want to get to a place where we have some really great technology that’s underpinned by AI, and especially in the recruitment and learning and development space.
To do this we need to cement the right strategy and find the right partners to help us achieve it. As part of this drive, we’ve recently created a new role of People Transformation Director to lead our People Technology Roadmap. And, as a company, we’re already partnering with industry-leaders in the space including Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, AWS and SAP.
Another major consideration is making sure we use AI ethically and that our customers and colleagues feel comfortable with how we use data. To ensure we set robust standards, we have an Ethical use of AI policy and an established AI Ethics Board at Mitie to make sure everything is in line with the very latest requirements and thought leadership.
We’ve spent a lot of time preparing these things behind the scenes, while we’ve seen a lot of competitors experiment in the public eye. But we now have clear investment, clear partners and a clear strategy to lead facilities transformation.
To learn more about our approach to artificial intelligence, read about how Mitie is redefining the future of FM with AI.
Redefining the future of FM with AI
We believe that AI for facilities management makes things more humanly possible. But what does this mean when it comes to delivering exceptional services? Discover the five ways we’re using artificial intelligence to drive true facilities transformation.
Read next
Accurate data: the foundation of good AI for facilities management
AI can be an invaluable tool to help facilities managers get the most from their estates. But to be truly useful, it needs to be fed with accurate and meaningful data. By Dan Blake…
How to implement an AI strategy with ethics at its core
As AI transforms the facilities management industry, we look at the importance of ethical use – and how you can implement a strategy that guarantees it. By Gareth Rees, Director of Enterprise Technology, and…
How we’re using AI to drive facilities transformation
As AI plays a growing role in facilities management, we share how Mitie is putting this transformative technology to use – and what that means for our clients. By Anindya Biswas and Michael Moulsdale…