Beyond more apps: Connecting smart buildings into one AI-powered workplace experience

Smart buildings today are more connected than ever — yet the day-to-day experience of working in them often feels anything but seamless. Employees book a meeting room in one system, check office attendance in another, receive workplace announcements through a third channel, navigate a separate visitor management process, and rely on yet another tool entirely to request services or report a maintenance issue. Each system may work well on its own, but together they create friction rather than flow.

The uncomfortable truth is that this fragmentation doesn't just frustrate employees — it actively undermines the ROI of the smart building investments organisations have already made. More sensors, more dashboards, more standalone apps rarely solve the problem. In fact, they often make it worse, adding complexity for IT teams to maintain, diluting adoption, and leaving expensive infrastructure underused.

This session argues that the next real challenge for smart buildings isn't more technology — it's connection. Rather than layering on yet another isolated tool, forward-thinking organisations are learning to connect the systems they already have — calendars, room and desk booking, visitor management, workplace services, building screens, intranets, and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams or Google Chat — into a single, seamless entry point for the workplace experience.

AI agents play a pivotal role in making this possible, acting as an orchestration layer that lets employees simply ask, book, find, or solve everyday workplace needs — from reserving a desk to getting a contextual recommendation to reporting a broken light — directly from the tools they already use every day. The building doesn't need to be reinvented. It needs to be made usable.