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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
What role does AI play in your facilities management?
At Mitie, our approach to facilities transformation has always been about merging the very best people with the very latest tech. We’re fortunate enough to have experts across every touchpoint of the FM spectrum, from cleaning and security to engineering and decarbonisation. And they’re all supported by state-of-the-art innovations designed to make their jobs easier – like robot cleaners and data-driven business intelligence.
As technology becomes more advanced, this increasingly means that artificial intelligence is incorporated into our practices. It has a vital role to play at the heart of digital transformation in facilities management. And it’s our ambition to become the industry leader in AI-driven facilities transformation, using AI to provide the business intelligence and insights that support our experts on the ground.
We know this approach will help us to deliver a more effective service to our customers. And it’s something we’ve invested in for a long time.
For the last six years, we’ve dedicated £160 million to building a robust data infrastructure that sits at the heart of our AI strategy. This, combined with over 700 TB of industry data, our in-house AI expertise and collaboration with leading technology partners, allows us to generate insights at a speed and scale that would be impossible for a person to achieve. But this isn’t about replacing people – it’s about augmenting their abilities and helping them to reach higher standards.
By using AI to parse huge data sets, we can provide the predictions and recommendations that allow us to provide a higher quality service, whether that’s through predictive maintenance, state-of-the-art security solutions, intelligent cleaning, carbon intelligence or data-driven project delivery.
Added value for every client
As a company, AI can help us drive intelligence, efficiency and automation across all of our services, building efficiencies and creating opportunities to free people’s time for more value adding tasks.
The ultimate end goal is to improve the services we deliver to you, our customers, and AI can do that across five key areas:
1. Firstly, by analysing huge amounts of structured and unstructured data, AI can help you gain granular visibility across your entire estate, enabling you to develop an in-depth picture of where problems and opportunities lie. Our AI-based anomaly detection algorithm means we can provide details of which assets are likely to fail at any given time.
2. This insight can also help you uncover the trends, patterns and signifiers that lead to accurate foresight. When you know what’s likely to happen next, you can ensure processes are proactive rather than reactive, so you can reduce costs, maintain uptime and plan responses to critical situations – before they impact business performance. We’ve previously used this method to proactively maintain air conditioning systems to avoid premature failure and maintain a high quality of service, for instance.
3. And with insight and foresight comes new levels of agility. With the ability to spot emerging trends and react quickly to them, you can deploy facilities management resources where they’re needed most – which means issues are dealt with swiftly and you can save unnecessary costs caused by overprovisioning. One example of this is our “intelligent cleaning” approach, which sees us predict which areas will need the most attention on any given day to make sure we maintain an exceptional level of cleanliness across estates.
4. All of this combines to create next-level user experiences across your built environment, which can help encourage workers back to the office or boost brand reputations. In fact, with AI you can create environments that intelligently adapt to demand, using sensors to monitor use and processing data at speed to make sure operations run not just uninterrupted, but optimally.
5. And finally, AI can play a huge role in building resilience into your environments, helping you cut FM response times, ensure compliance and minimise downtime – all so your people can use your facilities uninterrupted.
What does the future hold?
The term artificial intelligence has been around since the 50s, but the most recent generation of AI technology has been a noticeable step change, which means the true AI revolution in facilities management is still in its relatively early stages. But we can expect a rapid acceleration from here on out.
In the short term, we expect to see more and more firms making use of data and existing AI technologies, such as machine learning and text-based generative AI, to provide recommendations and improve services. This will soon be followed by more companies incorporating video, images and sound as further sources for AI to draw from. And there’s potential for small AI chips embedded in sensor networks to help bring intelligence closer to the assets being managed.
The use cases we will see in a few years’ time might well amaze us all. The sky is the limit when it comes to what AI can help our experts achieve. But what’s vital, as the technology progresses, is that our use of AI remains responsible and ethical.
To ensure this is the case, we’ve recently launched our Responsible and Ethical Use of AI policy, that makes sure we purchase, evaluate, develop, test and use AI in line with the very latest standards. This is accompanied by an internal AI ethics board that has a large cross-functional team of leaders from each part of our business.
This is of paramount importance for us, because as much as AI can revolutionise our work, it has to do so in a way that puts people first – like all technology should.
To learn more about our approach to and use of AI, read our AI Manifesto here.
A practical manifesto for facilities AI
We believe that AI 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 in our practical manifesto for facilities AI.
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