The Future Of Facilities Management

Facilio CEO, Prabhu R, discusses the future of IoT and AI in connected facilities management.

- Prabhu Ramachandran

The role of facilities management is changing, with building owners increasingly expecting facilities management teams to be stakeholders and collaborators for business growth. The focus is shifting to highly efficient operations and an elevated occupant experience.

Promising FM-tech startup, Facilio, utilises IoT and AI to help commercial building portfolios achieve better visibility into and control over facility operations, maintenance, sustainability management, and the tenant experience.

Founded early last year, Facilio has successfully established a strong foothold in the US, Middle East, and India, managing a substantial 20 million sq.ft of built space within six months of commercial product availability.

Prabhu Ramachandran, Founder and CEO, Facilio, chats with us to discuss what’s next in tech innovation for the FM industry.

Tell us about the origins of Facilio and the need for FMs to embrace technology today?

In a scenario of managing large and distributed building portfolios, every facility involves multiple vendorheavy legacy systems that follow a hardware-driven approach to manage operations.

Despite billions of dollars worth of investments in automation of buildings, they continue to perform at sub-optimal levels. This is because facilities are not optimising their benefits from this automation and instead end up being inefficient. Facilities management is seen as a cost-center because they continue to operate in a fire-fighting mode, rather than being proactive.

With a strong software background, we established Facilio to create a pure-play software solution that utilises IoT and AI to help facilities make the switch from being reactive service providers to predictive value-partners.