What Office Buildings Must Learn From the Failure of Smart Homes

I love technology. Over many years, I have been an early adopter of everything from DVRs (remember ReplayTV?) to electric cars. As smart devices came to our homes, I jumped in right away. Nest Thermostats, Ring Doorbell, Apple TV, and smart speakers. Today, I wake up every day having to remember what room I am in to figure out what app I need to use. Sure, you could hire an expensive home automation expert, and some apps can bring in some disparate manufacturers’ products. But it’s too hard to integrate everyone’s products. As a user, you quickly realize that these ecosystems are designed to be self-contained. To get the smoothest experience, you’re encouraged to buy everything from Google, or everything from Apple, while Amazon leveraging Alexa to make shopping on its platform as easy as a voice command! The idea of a single pane of glass is still just a dream.

But the missed opportunity and risk of allowing this to happen in office buildings could be devastating.  On the surface, it’s not dissimilar to what’s happened in our homes. Large BMS and HVAC manufacturers want you to buy their complex brands. For years, real estate could afford to hire experts to work on these in our buildings because everyone knew these machines were not “set it and forget it” technology. It was brute force and inefficient, but as long as rents were high and space was scarce, it worked.

But now our experts are retiring. Building technology is more efficient, but more complex, and tenants are not ok with just calling in an occasional hot or cold call. My home office was never chilly during the pandemic, and the bathroom was nearby and clean! While the office is desperately needed for companies to continue to grow, mentor emerging talent, and collaborate in ways that will always be better than a Zoom call, the environment you work in matters more than ever. Am I commuting 1 hour each way just to be uncomfortable?

The proptech industry responded in our typical fashion. Build single-point solutions that fix one problem or the other. But just like our hardware brethren, they rarely integrated seamlessly with one another. It was not a holistic view, and as great as some of these applications are, the actual building operators are suffering from massive “dashboard fatigue!” I dare you to go tell your building engineer that you have yet another thing you need them to log into.

At our homes, you theoretically could buy everything from Google if you really wanted to, but we won’t do that in our office buildings. We use different hardware for different applications for different reasons. Maybe you did want to use a single manufacturer until you were over budget and “value engineering” happened. Or you might have acquired a building and aren’t just going to throw out the equipment right away as part of your investment thesis. Regional differences, complex building codes, and a million other reasons won’t let us just pick one horse.

So, not surprisingly, like many things in our lives, going to the cloud is the only answer that makes sense.  Now all of your hardware talks to each other. Your software also talks to your hardware and other software! Data is normalized and organized, and no input is ignored. This means the data coming from your BMS, your building engineers’ years of experience, and the people who work in our buildings too.

As labor shortages increase, we need to make this movement happen faster. If we don’t, forgetting which smart speaker I have in my bedroom will be the least of our problems.