AI Can’t Design Your Office, But It Can Help You Score It

Propmodo Technology

By Franco Faraudo · September 4, 2024

Greetings,

In today's Propmodo Technology newsletter, we're exploring how AI is shaping office design—not by creating layouts but by helping companies score and optimize their strategies through data analysis and scenario modeling, all while keeping human judgment in the lead.

Let’s go!

AI Can’t Design Your Office, but It Can Help You Score It

The buzz around AI has led some to believe it's the solution to many of our toughest problems. However, those who truly understand AI—how it must be taught, nurtured, and queried—know that it's not always reliable when it comes to providing concrete answers. Instead, AI and machine learning are incredibly useful for analyzing data to help solve problems. AI can uncover correlations that even a team of humans might miss.

It's no surprise, then, that office designers and managers aren't yet asking AI to generate blueprints for their next office layout. "Off-the-shelf tools have not been able to deliver recommendations that are truly helpful for our clients," said Scott Nelson, CEO of Occupier Services at Colliers. He and his team had just finished surveying many of their largest corporate clients to gauge sentiment around their real estate strategies. What they found is that many are still reconsidering their office footprints, with 73 percent planning to "optimize" their space. While some companies expect AI to help with that optimization, they are the minority—only 31 percent of executives surveyed believe that AI will transform their corporate real estate functions within the next five years.

The companies seeing success with AI, Nelson explained, are those working with in-house teams to integrate the technology into their processes. "We work extensively with clients using AI for analytics and scenario modeling, but for AI to be most effective, a company needs to spend time creating a decision-making framework and thinking through their criteria," Nelson said. These criteria could include real estate metrics like cost, footprint size, or location availability, as well as business outcomes like engagement, productivity, and turnover.

The goal is to rank these criteria so that the effectiveness of an office strategy can be measured with a single score. Once a score can be given to any possible outcome, AI can run various scenarios and compare how the outcomes differ. While this data may not provide a complete answer, it can make decision-making more analytical and help companies reevaluate their priorities. By adjusting criteria and rerunning the calculations, companies can see how the "optimal" scenario changes.

It's important to remember that despite AI becoming a household name, the technology is still relatively new. Each day, advances are making AI more capable of answering complex questions. "Every time we use AI with a client, they become more confident in the numbers we provide," Nelson said. One day, there might be enough confidence to follow AI's recommendations entirely, but for now, decisions this important still need a human touch.

The real benefit AI offers may not be in designing office spaces or planning strategies but in helping companies approach complicated problems like a computer would. Even nuanced decisions, like office strategy, can be broken down into a ranked list. Numbers can be assigned to each input, and a score can be calculated based on a formula. This process can be repeated over and over, with the critical role of the human being to continually rethink the inputs and adjust the formula.

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Propmodo Technology is edited by Franco Faraudo with contributions from readers like you and the Propmodo team.

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