Facility managers have known the challenge for years: budgets that stay the same or shrink, while demands around comfort, safety, and user experience continue to increase. Still, something fundamental has changed. Recently, there has been a great deal of news about major technology companies such as Salesforce and Google laying off thousands of employees in a short period of time, with AI cited as one of the reasons. That wave is affecting nearly every organization, including facility departments.
Spacewell, an international software company and part of the Nemetschek Group, sees this shift every day among its customers. CEO John Van Tessel and Chief Product Officer Gilles Ghyssaert are working on a platform that helps facility teams handle that pressure without compromising service quality.
“Besides personnel costs, building costs are the second-largest expense item on an organization’s profit and loss statement,” says Van Tessel. “This topic is increasingly being discussed in the boardroom.”
– John Van Tessel, CEO, Spacewell
Ghyssaert adds that the pressure is not new, but it has taken on a different dimension. Facility departments must prove that they are working more efficiently, while SLAs (service level agreements) are becoming stricter. Offices must function flawlessly, contractors must collaborate seamlessly, and employees must be given an experience that attracts them to the office.
Still too early for hard percentages
Expectations around AI are high, sometimes too high. People easily talk about efficiency gains of fifty to sixty percent, but reality is more nuanced. “In one domain you do see those gains, in another you do not,” Van Tessel acknowledges. “There is certainly ambition, but we are still at an early stage when it comes to attaching hard percentages to everything.”
Ghyssaert is specific about where AI will make a difference. At its core, facility management revolves around inventory, documents, contracts, and service requests that need to be resolved quickly. Even with good software, that process is still largely manual. “An AI assistant sitting alongside an employee in the system, answering questions and offering advice and support, can reduce six hours of searching to just a few minutes.”
A practical example: an organization with hundreds of locations, where the facility department must first consult contracts, historical data, and asset information for half of all disruptions as soon as a report comes in. An AI assistant can then assess the urgency and advise which contractor and approach are the best fit. In doing so, the system uses contract information, SLAs, historical asset data, and previous work orders. Tickets that previously remained open for six days are now handled within six hours. Ghyssaert explains: “If you connect a knowledge base to that, the solution can sometimes be completely self-service. No technician needed, problem solved in six minutes.”
Energy, workplace, and the end of data silos
Spacewell operates across three product domains—Workplace, Asset, and Energy—each with its own applications and apps, but all on the same AI platform. In energy management, the focus is on millions of data points from consumption and production. AI filters anomalies, generates reports, and makes insights directly available. Without that support, an employee would have to monitor data full-time.
In workplace management, Spacewell helps organizations make better use of their square meters. In expensive office locations such as London or Amsterdam, every unused workspace counts. With AI, employees can more easily find a room by speaking to their smartphone, while real estate and workplace professionals have a virtual assistant at hand to interpret insights and test simulations. “Instead of hiring a consultant, you have the analysis available immediately,” says Ghyssaert.
Perhaps the most important development is the breaking down of data silos. Spacewell can also use sensor data on occupancy and air quality for planning catering, cleaning, and security. One dataset becomes relevant across multiple facility domains at the same time. “AI can uncover relationships across different data sources that a human would only discover after weeks,” says Ghyssaert. “That will soon be available in real time.”
Facility management deserves a seat at the table
Spacewell positions itself as an enterprise partner that does not offer AI as a standalone feature, but integrates it into every workflow. With every new functionality, the question is asked what role AI can play. The emphasis is on European compliance and reliability, which is a deliberate point of differentiation compared with startups that may have technology, but lack customer data and sector knowledge.
For facility directors who still have doubts, Van Tessel’s message is clear: smarter decision-making requires better tools, and buildings are only becoming more complex. “The future of facility management is not about more people or more systems, but about smarter support in every decision.”
Ghyssaert looks further ahead: “Facility professionals are leaving the basement. They are becoming part of the critical processes of every company and deserve a place in the boardroom. A sector that evolved slowly for decades is now at the beginning of an acceleration that will permanently transform it.”
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