Maximizing Office Space with AI: A CRE Leader’s Guide

In today’s workplace, there’s no room for unused space. Rent is one the largest workplace costs, and when space goes unused, leaders lose out on their investment. With a majority of companies shifting to hybrid work strategies, it’s crucial to ensure the office aligns with employee behaviors. This helps leaders maximize their investment and avoid wasted costs and resources.

To optimize the workplace, commercial real estate (CRE) leaders must understand how space is utilized. This knowledge allows them to cut costs related to unnecessary spaces or make changes to right-size their portfolio. However, these decisions aren’t made lightly. Adding another floor or consolidating space can lead to long, costly projects that might not guarantee success.

To avoid pitfalls, CRE leaders can use data to help guide their choices, but even then the process can be lengthy and manual. AI-powered solutions can help speed up the analysis, simplifying the overall decision making process. 

Let’s take a closer look at the decision-making challenges for CRE leaders and the long-term impact of AI-powered solutions.

Decision Making Challenges for CRE

The overall process for making workplace decisions related to your portfolio or individual office buildings is manual and lengthy; with so many sources for data (room booking data, sensor data, Wifi data, etc.), analyzing and evaluating each source is complex and time-consuming. When dealing with multiple office buildings, this requires even more time, analyzing numerous spaces, floors, and locations.

It can be overwhelming.

Even with solutions like the Occupancy Intelligence Platform, visualizing data is easy, but pinpointing trends and insights can take days, even weeks, especially without a data analyst on the team. For many CRE leaders, getting approval on the final solution can take even longer, often requiring conversations with executives, leadership, and potentially even board members to gain support for large-scale projects like expansions.

It takes a full real estate team to make these decisions - workplace experience specialists, data analysts, real estate analysts, space designers, office managers, and more. Unfortunately many teams are teams of one, leaving all of the responsibilities in the hands of a solo employee.

During the Occupancy Intelligence Summit, a VergeSense customer Mark Bell, VP of Corporate Real Estate & Mobility at Raymond James, shared his experience trying to understand all his company's workplace data collected from sensors and badge swipes. Like many other leaders, he doesn’t have a full team of data analysts and found that to hinder the overall decision-making process.

Incorporating AI-powered solutions into the decision-making process can help alleviate this stress and cut the time spent analyzing data in half. Our latest product release, Workplace Assistant was built to help revolutionize workplace operations and can turn data into decisions faster than ever before.

With enterprise-grade security and privacy, Workplace Assistant users can receive analysis and recommendations tailored to their specific needs within minutes. It combines the capabilities of a real estate strategist, workplace experience, and occupancy analyst - all right at your fingertips, allowing you to capitalize on optimization opportunities without skipping a beat.

Let’s see how it works.

Workplace Assistant: Enhancing Productivity

Workplace Assistant is our latest, groundbreaking solution designed to transform how CRE leaders manage their portfolios and optimize their spaces. Powered by generative AI, it enhances decision-making and provides rapid results.

• Ask any question and receive a personalized recommendation based on trends and insights from your workplace’s data.
• Pinpoint excess capacity or identify expansion opportunities by understanding occupancy trends, peaks, and averages over time.
• Interact with your own data and quickly create and access data visualizations like bar charts and graphs.
  
  

Workplace Assistant can be a valuable asset to your team, easily identifying opportunities for cost savings and providing insights into how your space mix is being used. Space optimization has never been easier.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some prompts you can try out:

• Can I consolidate 4 floors into 3 without impacting employee experience?
• What’s the average person count each day of the week? Are we over capacity?
• How should we adjust our space mix to ensure our space is being optimized?
• Can you rank spaces types by floor according to total time usage?
• What size meeting rooms would be most beneficial for our space mix?
• Which neighborhoods are being used inefficiently?
• Do we have enough space in our neighborhoods or should we add another floor?

Each question will result in a personalized recommendation including cost savings, graphs, charts, and lists to help better understand the solution. With quicker access to insights, you'll have more time to experiment with innovative ideas and create a positive impact on both the workspace and overall workplace experience.

Want to discover the impact of Workplace Assistant? Learn more here.