How Honeywell's AI Expertise Helps Office Buildings Realize Their Proptech Ambitions

Commercial building owners and operators recognize that smart technologies, smartly used, are the keys to a successful property, with benefits ranging from attracting and retaining tenants to improving net operating income and helping a building stand out from its neighbors.

While owners understand the potential of these tools, they are less certain about how to make proptech work most effectively for them and their tenants. Less than 40% of occupiers surveyed rated their buildings’ tech programs as very successful — even as building owners continue to invest in technologies to address a range of priorities, from tenant well-being to sustainable operations.

This isn't surprising considering that many buildings’ proptech tools often lack the integration necessary to produce the most benefit for their users, said Dani Stern, Honeywell senior director of product management for commercial smart buildings.

“Most office buildings in the U.S. are somewhere in the first third of their digital transformation journey,” Stern said. “Class-A office spaces that are more premium and want to attract knowledge workers are the farthest along in their digital transformation.”

The buildings Stern described have owners who recognize the value that proptech brings to their tenants, facilities managers and owners, particularly as many businesses are calling employees back to the office. Without proptech tools working in unison, a building occupant might not reap the synergistic benefits it hopes to achieve by recentralizing its workforce.

“At the end of the day, a building is just walls if not for the people that go there and make that magic of in-person collaboration work,” he said. 

Stern said that the “magic” only happens if a building's proptech is part of a smart building ecosystem where data from all information and operational technology systems, including recent proptech additions, constantly streams into one building platform. This opens up an array of opportunities for outcomes, experiences and automation, all while being controlled and monitored via a single dashboard.

And yet, despite billions being spent across the sector to make commercial buildings smarter, many owners and operators are still waiting for their proptech investments to pay off.

The problem is that building owners often approach technology in a piecemeal manner, Stern said. This can result in proptech tools that perform as advertised within their narrow purview but don’t communicate with each other. Without a holistic approach that integrates all proptech elements, it is difficult to spot and address trends among the mountains of data a typical building creates daily.

“Once you have connected proptech systems, your building can be monitored 24/7 by experienced technicians who are alerted when something happens, and they can usually solve it remotely, without even dispatching a person or incurring expensive downtime for you,” Stern said. “But you can only achieve these outcomes once you integrate your smart building systems.”

Win-Win-Win Scenario

Stern said he has seen a paradigm change in how people view proptech. Many now realize that an integrated proptech platform — and the transparency into building operations data that it allows — can benefit all stakeholders and make the relationships among them less adversarial.

“Six or seven years ago, we might tell an owner that the tenants want access to the building’s sustainability data, and they’d respond, ‘No way, they’ll just use it to complain about their lease terms,’” he said. “I think that now there is a deeper understanding among tenants, facility managers and owners alike as to how the outcomes benefit the people who use the building.” 

The owners can benefit from a building that is differentiated from competitors and attractive to premium tenants. An integrated platform also allows them to identify and solve potential issues quickly.

Tenants, some of whom might miss working at home, now spend their weekdays in a more comfortable, safer environment that inspires productivity and teamwork.

“Knowledge worker companies benefit the most when their employees come into the office to collaborate, and their employees are most productive when they know a building has invested in technologies to keep them comfortable and safe,” Stern said.

Digital integration also benefits building operations and maintenance teams that are losing experienced employees to retirement.

“It's very hard to replace somebody who has known a building operating system for 20 or 30 years,” Stern said. “A new workforce doesn't have that level of knowledge, but they have higher expectations of technology, and AI modeling can alert them when they need to look at a certain part and fix or replace it.”

He added that this can lead to higher job satisfaction and retention of employees while improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.

Getting Started

Although the benefits of proptech integration are widely understood, obstacles to wider adoption include misperceptions about the cost or effort involved. Stern said both concerns are overstated if the building works with a reliable technology partner.

“They might assume that we will ask for millions of dollars to replace all of their existing proptech tools, which is absolutely not the case with Honeywell,” he said. “Our goal is to meet you where you are, minimize the capex cost and help you to achieve your goals as quickly as possible.”

Rather than applying a “rip and replace” mindset to a building’s existing proptech, Stern said Honeywell prefers an “augment and increase” approach that allows the customer to gain the greatest benefit from their technology platform, whether it is largely a Honeywell system or not. 

“We want to understand their pain points and goals so we can tailor a solution to the building, or buildings if it involves their entire portfolio,” he said. “We also want to understand what their tenants need and will even meet with some of them to facilitate that process.”

Stern said his company’s approach is meant to help office buildings more easily navigate their proptech integration journey so that they get the most benefit from their building technologies.

“Whether it's fire, life safety, building management, occupancy sensing, indoor air quality, badging or parking, a smart, integrated building will bring all of those pieces together to benefit the tenants and the owner, and Honeywell can be a partner in achieving their goals,” he said. 

This article was produced in collaboration between Honeywell and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.