Early in my career, I got called into my boss’s office because I didn’t look busy enough.
I was managing open-store remodels. A lot of the work repeated from one project to the next, so I built an Excel spreadsheet to make things faster. I could enter the information from a site inspection and get a quote, an ordering checklist, and a schedule for all the moving parts. Each day, I checked what had been ordered, shipped, delivered, and completed. After I took care of the exceptions, I was caught up for the day.
I’d walk around the office and check in with other people because I had nothing to do. My boss found this suspicious, which is why I ended up in his office.
When I showed him how I was doing the work, the conversation changed. He asked me to teach other people this process.
I’ve always been like this. When I was a little kid, my mom owned a gymnastics gym, and I’d get stuck in the back room with little jobs to do, like stuffing envelopes or folding flyers. I was obsessed with finding the fastest, best way to get through them and still do a great job.
We had an old TV in that room with a VHS player built into it. One of the movies was the original Cheaper by the Dozen. The dad was an efficiency expert. I remember watching him while I was trying to figure out better ways to do my own little jobs and thinking, “Whoa, that’s a thing.”
When I see new tools or new ways of doing things, I get very excited because of what they unlock. That’s how I feel about AI and the future of facilities departments.
We have spent a long time accepting constant activity as part of the job. A day disappears into chasing contractors, looking for updates, and answering the same questions. Not to mention the constant interruption of having to explain ourselves to other departments and higher-ups. You go home feeling behind.
I believe that today’s leaders have more powerful tools than ever to design a better way to work. We have AI agents that can carry out tasks, communication tools like video chat and email, and the ability to hire talented people from anywhere in the world. That gives us access to resources that are more vast—and, in some ways, more powerful—than ever before.
As a result, we will increasingly scale and improve facilities maintenance departments in a fundamentally different way. AI agents can handle well-defined, repeatable tasks, while people focus on work that requires connection, decision-making, nuance, and critical thinking.
I believe the next generation of facilities departments will be built around that division of work. What we hire people to do, and what their day feels like, will change with it.
How facilities maintenance departments scale
When I talk to a facilities maintenance leader, I want to understand how their department operates and whether its processes are documented. That is a foundational step in figuring out how to scale.
They need a documented, well-defined process for handling an issue from the moment it is reported to the moment it is resolved. What information is captured along the way? Where do people have to intervene?
They also need to document how they manage the work: how they assign contractors, review quotes, track open work orders, and follow up. When those steps are clear, they can become well-defined, repeatable tasks.
An AI-native department starts with a leader who defines the goals and decides how the department will work. They decide which outcomes matter most, how work and decisions should flow, and where AI can help the team. Then they can define who does what, which tools the team needs, and how they will measure progress.
Once the process is understood, agents can carry out the repeatable work around it. They can check records, send follow-ups, update systems, gather information, and write routine updates automatically. The information they find becomes part of the department’s operating picture.
What requires human attention is usually the exceptions. Agents should recognize when information is missing, authority is unclear, conditions have changed, or a decision is required. They should bring that situation to the responsible person with the relevant context, rather than forcing someone to search through every record and chase every answer individually.
Consider contractor follow-up. The process may need to establish whether someone accepted the work, when they expect to arrive, what happened on site, what work was performed, and whether the original problem is resolved. Those are distinct questions, and the system needs to preserve the distinctions between them.
A department can define that process and approve an agent to carry it out. The agent checks the relevant records, follows up when agreed conditions are met, and puts each response where the team can use it. The same process can run across many work orders without someone initiating every step.
The team can see what happened, what is still waiting, and what needs their attention. For example, a contractor may check in without leaving notes about the work they actually performed. An agent can follow up with the contractor to ask what was done and record the response. And since an agent can work concurrently, it can get updates from contractors at a scale that a person cannot.
The person responsible for contractor follow-up still owns the process. They review mistakes, improve the instructions, and decide when a situation requires judgment. Their knowledge becomes part of how the work gets done, and the department benefits from it without asking the same question every time. An agent should earn greater responsibility through results the team has checked.
You don’t need to replace your existing technology to work in an AI-native way. Build on it wherever its connections and permissions support the work. Only consider replacing systems that are truly limiting better processes and ways of work.
Greater human capacity
I think AI is expansive.
There is work facilities teams would like to do that they never get to. They want to understand why the same equipment keeps failing. They want to spend time with a contractor before the relationship becomes a problem. They want to improve how a new location comes into the operation. They have ideas, but the follow-up queue gets their attention first.
What becomes possible when a capable person has agents helping carry that load?
The first facilities hire at a growing company could build processes that keep running while they work on the next problem. They could establish a department with more capability earlier, and add people when there is a clear human responsibility to fill.
An established department could give its experienced coordinators more room to use what they know. They could spend time understanding the history and root cause of a recurring problem, question whether the proposed repair will solve the problem, and spend time talking to contractors to gain knowledge and insights that will improve the way their team operates.
This changes hiring and management too. We should look for people who are capable of systems-level thinking—who can explain a task clearly, use the available tools, evaluate the output, and know when something deserves a closer look. We should teach those skills to the people already on the team. Their knowledge of the work is a valuable place to start.
Capacity alone doesn’t decide what we do with it. Leaders do. We can fill every freed hour with more demands and recreate the same stress. Or we can use some of that room to improve service, develop people, and do the work we kept putting off. We should make that choice deliberately.
Better working lives
I want to be part of helping leaders build departments where people have the clarity and margin to do their best work. You can see which routine work is moving, which issues need a decision, and what actually happened. People know what they own. Recurring problems become better processes, and each person’s learning makes the work easier for the next person.
There will still be emergencies. Buildings need physical work, contractors have constraints, and people disagree. Facilities leaders will still make difficult decisions with incomplete information and take responsibility for the result. But when the department runs well, those moments receive the attention they deserve instead of competing with constant operational noise.
That’s why I care about how work works. Productivity and efficiency matter because they create room: room for people to think, room to improve the system, and room to live full lives beyond the workday. A department that gets more done while keeping everyone under constant stress has not truly solved the problem.
We should design roles people understand, provide useful support, and make it possible to do a good job without carrying the whole operation in your head. People should have enough margin to contribute ideas, solve problems, and see the difference their work makes.
I want facilities leaders to feel empowered to build their departments on purpose—departments where people are not constantly overwhelmed, where contributions are visible, and where everyone can point to ways they helped the team run better. I want the people in those departments to have room to think, make things better, and be caught up without having to apologize for it.