JLL cites 92% of companies are actively testing AI, and only 5% have achieved their objectives – considering a barrier to be infrastructure. Real estate operations ordinarily run across multiple disconnected tools. When maintenance history lives in one system, space booking in another and lease documentation in a third, AI cannot find the patterns it needs.
“When you’re stitching these reports together manually, you’re ultimately defending your real estate budget to the CFO using little more than guesswork.
“It’s a lot easier to measure success and equate it to a financial gain when you can literally see that people who were spending 20% of their week performing these tasks now have that time back.”
Michael Taggart, Executive Director, Client Growth and Technology, APAC, JLL
Angela Barwick, Executive Director, Real Estate Technology Services at JLL, mentions that 89% of Asia-Pacific companies are failing to get expected results from at least three of their technology platforms.
“When technology planning is treated as an afterthought to be sorted out during the office fit-out phase rather than at site selection, organisations face major infrastructure compatibility issues, cybersecurity delays and costly design reworks.”
Angela Barwick, Executive Director, Real Estate Technology Services, JLL
Resolving this requires a consolidated platform layer such as ServiceNow, Eptura and Corrigo, which can bring space, visitor and maintenance data together into a single, cloud-based workflow engine.
“Companies frequently rush to purchase expensive AI tools before resolving their underlying data silos, and this results in advanced algorithms running on completely unreliable numbers.”
Shimin Lim, Director, Client Growth and Technology, APAC, JLL
When organisations do build a proper foundation, the results are strong. For example, Royal London Asset Management deployed AI-powered building management across 12 properties to autonomously tune heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems based on real-time occupancy and weather patterns. This automated optimisation saved occupiers £1m annually and delivered an average ROI of 330%.
Standing still on AI for workplace optimisation is the real competitive risk. The solution lies in addressing digital infrastructure first and capturing the immediate workflow automation opportunities that most organisations overlook.
