LendLease, Google Create System That Will Know When You’re in the Office

If you need a high-tech system to determine how efficiently office space is being used—a system that can scan an employee’s desktop calendar as well as cameras in the elevators and sensors elsewhere in a building that track people’s movements—Lendlease Digital and Google Cloud have partnered to create such an offering. 

Lendlease Digital, a unit of Sydney, Australia-based global real estate company Lendlease, is leveraging Google Cloud to create Podium Property Insights (PPI), a proptech platform designed to help workplace managers and building owners optimize the use of space in buildings in the new era of hybrid work patterns.

Accenture and Lendlease have a strategic partnership to develop PPI and scale the platform to the market. Launched this week, PPI now is operating in pilot programs in select buildings around the world.

The partners are promising PPI will be able to serve up “higher-fidelity occupancy data” by collecting information on worker habits from a panoply of embedded sensors, video cameras, Wi-Fi systems and monitoring of cloud-based programs like Office365, among other data collection points.

Designed for “enterprise-scaled” commercial properties, the autonomous PPI platform will crunch the data it collects on worker movements—what the partners are calling “personalized insights” about work patterns—running it through a Google algorithm that will enable PPI to inform strategies for office footprint decisions and more efficient use of space.

A screenshot of a Podium Property Insights dashboard released by the partners shows a “Desk Booking Level Today” view that appears to be an office floor plan overlaid with what looks like an infrared reading of where workers are congregating on that floor.

Ruh said PPI is “experimenting” with the use of video surveillance in the workplace to monitor office occupancy, adding his assurance that the use of video would not involve identifying people or evaluating the productivity of individual workers.

The partnership says Google’s algorithms can precisely project how many individuals are coming into a workplace, on which days and how much time they’re spending there.

Lendlease is stressing that “employee satisfaction” is a primary goal of the use of the metrics it is gleaning from the PPI platform, along with footprint utilization, well-being, security and sustainability.

As an example of sustainability, Ruh noted that if a company is offering meals as an inducement for workers to come into the office, it won’t order too much food if it has a precise estimate of the number of people who will show up that day.

The partnership said it will use PPI data to help create “versatile work experiences, intentional collaboration alternatives and empathetic administration” to enhance worker satisfaction and efficiency in flexible, hybrid workplaces.