Is facilities management ready for artificial intelligence tools?
Yes—and AI is already changing the way facilities are managed, maintained, and inspected.
Tom Treanor, chief marketing officer for Sensfix, demonstrated how AI can make life easier and work more efficient in his presentation “AI in Facilities Management: It's Not Just Talk: Real-World Examples” at the 2025 Northern California Facilities Expo in Santa Clara, California. Sensfix, an agentic AI facility maintenance platform, uses the technology to augment existing workflows, optimize operations and maintenance, and enhance communications.
“Facility maintenance is inefficient, expensive, and fragmented,” explained Treanor. “What we find out there as the current state is that issue detection and reporting are very ad hoc and cause chaos with phone, text, email, in-person reporting, and manual entry systems once you get back to your computer. Managing and tracking the issues are also painful. Facility managers report a growing number of issues, and teams are understaffed as people retire and it’s harder to bring in new headcount.”
Service technicians waste a significant amount of time on unproductive tasks, such as waiting, showing up without the right parts, not having the right information, and waiting for approvals, Treanor added. Monitoring operations data is another FM nightmare, with multiple systems and paper-based tools complicating processes unnecessarily.
How AI Can Help Optimize Workflows
AI can be used across your portfolio to optimize both hard services (HVAC, electrical, plumbing, structural maintenance, etc.) and soft services (cleaning, security, reception) with technologies that are available today. AI-enabled cameras, apps, drones, sensors, and more can also help streamline your team’s workflows by identifying and categorizing issues, gathering data, and making sure your techs have the right manuals and other information they need to do their jobs efficiently. Treanor shared an example of an optimized maintenance workflow enhanced by AI at every step of the process.
Recognizing Issues
The workflow begins when AI recognizes there is an issue that needs to be resolved. It can detect issues through existing or new CCTV cameras, people reporting problems through a mobile app, drone- or robot-based cameras or sensors, or other sources. Existing AI tools can do things like facial or character recognition via cameras or developing a digital twin of your facility so that AI can look for differences in your pipes compared to a previous baseline scan, for example.
Apps that incorporate AI not only allow people to report issues easily, but also to flesh out the problem further and in some cases, coach the reporter through how to solve the issue, Treanor said. AI can also read the value of a meter or another measuring device, saving you the trouble of a manual reading.
Tracking Issues
The ability to track the status of existing issues and their resolution is a core benefit of AI-enabled workflows, Treanor said. Once issues are detected, some can be resolved automatically. In other cases, a known issue can trigger a workflow. AI can classify and prioritize the issue, then route it to the appropriate service provider or team.
Data Capture and Analysis
AI can capture data from meters, sensors, and other sources and archive them in a database for review. “You have auditable, trackable data going into your system that can be used for management review, compliance reviews, etc.,” Treanor said. “These thresholds for certain values can trigger an action or alerts.”
Workflows
Based on the specific issues or other triggers, AI can initiate a workflow. The workflow might the be handled by agentic AI or by people or systems, Treanor explained.
Service Management
Service personnel can be equipped with an app or another tool that serves up relevant issue and equipment data so they understand what’s happening when a service request comes in, Treanor said. AI tools can retrieve equipment information and service manuals through a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system, which stores all equipment information in a central database for easy searching and recovery. The RAG system can also store internal documents or processes you’ve created, giving service personnel all the internal knowledge they’ll need in the field to fix equipment.
“Conversational AI on the front end has helped the issue reporter—the person who found the issue—clarify the issue, so when [the service technician] goes out there, they’re ready, versus coming in cold and having to flesh out the basics,” Treanor added.
Holistic Location and Asset Views
Vendors who service multiple facilities and building owners and managers who oversee portfolios can use AI tools to compare and contrast facilities against each other on a dashboard, Treanor said. You can see which issues are happening across your portfolio and implement fixes that are common to multiple facilities at the same time.
6 Ideas for Using AI in Commercial Buildings
In addition to numerous applications in industrial buildings and transportation fleets, AI tools can quickly make a difference in commercial buildings, Treanor explained. Those applications could include:
1. Asset Inventory Tasks
Scanning equipment and documenting brands, models, etc., in an AI-enhanced database can help you in numerous ways. Once your inventory is built, you can quickly see if something is missing or you can easily pull up the right manuals for a piece of equipment that needs maintenance. A warehouse could simplify the process of inventorying goods for sale or identifying items that have been moved or damaged.
2. Cleaning and Janitorial Scheduling
Most facilities’ approach to cleaning involves fixed schedules for various spaces regardless of how much they’ve been used, basic management of consumables, and dispatching triggered by complaints. AI can help you transition to an occupancy-based cleaning schedule by measuring the usage of meeting rooms, restrooms, etc. It can also enable usage-based, predictive, or real-time inventory for consumables. Cameras enhanced with AI can help spot spills or stray trash and trigger someone to clean them instead of waiting until a complaint comes in.
3. Task Completion Checking
Vision AI can confirm cleaning or maintenance tasks were completed by validating cleaned areas or maintenance zones, Treanor said. It can identify issues like missed spots or defects by comparing them to baseline conditions, ensuring quality.
4. Hazard Detection
Hazards like wet floors, blocked exits, or missing extinguishers can be identified with Computer Vision, a type of AI that enables computers to interpret and understand visual data from images and videos. Audio AI can detect smoke detector beeps and alarms from your uninterruptible power supply in real time and notify you that they need service.
5. Vendor Management
AI tools can greatly simplify the way you interact with vendors, Treanor explained. Contract intelligence is just one example; natural language processing can flag potential contract issues. You can also use AI to manage payment automation with a rules engine that holds or releases payments based on evidence-backed completion rather than time elapsed or verbal commitments.
6. Space Planning and Moves
AI can count the amount of people going into a room, helping you understand foot traffic patterns and make smarter space allocation decisions. Generative AI tools can also create layout options for different spaces.
“It’s just the beginning, but multimodal AI applications will have a significant impact on facility management overall and facility maintenance,” Treanor said. “One way to think about it is to consider the biggest inefficiencies in your operations and then think about how AI-enabled technologies might be able to help. Work with potential vendors, industry colleagues, and consultants to understand the issues and the opportunities.”
