Imagine students entering an academic building for a late-night study session. AI-powered sensors illuminate their path, ensuring safe passage and a welcoming environment. As they depart with midnight snacks in hand, robotic waste bins sort their trash into recyclable materials. Finally, when returning to their dormitory, a camera equipped with facial recognition software grants them entry.
At one time, this may have read like a page from a science fiction novel. But with artificial intelligence integration in campus facilities, this vision is fast becoming reality.
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AI is no longer a future-facing concept for campus safety and security; it’s a strategic imperative. From safeguarding students to promoting sustainability and reducing operational costs, AI is reshaping how colleges and universities manage their facilities.
How Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Facilities Management?
AI’s capabilities for predictive modeling, automation, and advanced analytics are transforming industries by augmenting human decision making and boosting productivity. In facilities management, AI integration spans IoT-based building controls, building management software, and security systems. It also includes standalone technologies, such as smart waste bins, cleaning robots, and even chatbots that field maintenance requests.
Even the most diligent campus facilities managers face a balancing act in tracking day-to-day building performance. Relying solely on human oversight makes real-time monitoring nearly impossible. AI stands out by analyzing countless data points to uncover hidden trends and support actionable predictions. This enables facilities managers to spot and respond to emerging risks early on, greatly reducing the potential for risks to evolve into crises. When applied to building maintenance or energy management, AI brings forth significant cost savings through optimized resource utilization.
Top Areas for Integration
AI has the potential to make facilities professionals more efficient in their day-to-day, elevating standards of performance. It also empowers facilities professionals to prevent student or staff injury stemming from physical, environmental, and chemical risks, creating a campus that is safer and more sustainable for students, faculty, and staff. Key areas for AI adoption are as follows:
Buildings and Operations Management
Higher education faces a $112 billion backlog in critical facilities and maintenance upgrades across public and private campuses. With a 32% funding shortfall for addressing deferred projects, facilities managers need strategies to maximize existing infrastructure in the near-term. AI-driven building controls enable smart sensors to track the performance of lighting, electrical, mechanical, and HVAC systems, flagging issues early and even uncovering potential code violations or compliance gaps.
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This proactive approach reduces the risk of maintenance issues becoming system failures, enabling facilities managers to extend the useful life of aging systems. Further, while maintenance requests can often get stuck in administrative silos, AI-powered chatbots offer the potential for more streamlined reporting by logging request details, assigning tasks, tracking timelines, and updating stakeholders, freeing up facilities managers to focus on high-impact projects.
Environmental Safety and Sustainability
More than 1,000 colleges and universities around the world have committed to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Supporting this goal, AI-enhanced energy management and control systems (EMCS) provide deeper insights into campus energy consumption. Key EMCS components, like ventilation controls, monitor indoor and outdoor temperatures, as well as air quality, to optimize safe, pollutant-free airflows.
Lighting automation also adjusts total output according to room occupancy and ambient light levels. AI-driven utility meters can identify energy usage outliers, revealing inefficiencies and opportunities for emissions reduction.
Student Safety and Security
After reaching a historic low in 2019, campus crime rebounded in 2022 to pre-pandemic levels, reigniting concerns around student safety. Artificial intelligence’s key advantage is prevention.
While AI-driven surveillance and facial recognition software has drawn controversy in the public sphere, when used responsibly, these technologies have the power to identify concerning behaviors in real-time, flagging potential threats to the proper authorities for further investigation. AI-powered analytics platforms can also spot trends in incident data providing security teams with insight into when and where crimes are likely to occur or whether crimes follow a similar course of action, unveiling bad actors’ patterns.
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AI Integration Makes Facilities Managers More Effective
While AI brings extensive opportunity to the future of facilities management, its implementation can feel like a daunting task for facilities leaders who are inundated with deferred maintenance, emergency repairs, and tightening budgets. However, campus case studies can offer both inspiration and a roadmap.
In partnership with Affiliated Engineers Inc. (AEI), the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have adopted AI-powered chatbots to automate data entry for maintenance requests and upgrades. This integration puts time back in the workday for busy facilities managers to focus on more strategic projects, such as campus sustainability design and planning.
These schools are also using AI to measure systems performance and operational efficiency, enhancing understanding of when campus facilities are most in-demand to ensure infrastructure meets the needs of today’s students.
The Path Forward
Facilities managers are no strangers to doing more with less. With artificial intelligence, conserving resources no longer has to come at the expense of campus safety.
Campus wide AI integration offers real-time insights into the interworking of school infrastructure, offering a more dynamic view than what is afforded by manual monitoring alone. AI empowers campus leaders to respond quickly to emerging risks, navigate technical roadblocks, and plan for the future.
While most institutions will not become AI-enabled overnight, early collaboration between administrative, operations, and facilities teams can set the foundation for future enablement. In these early stages, leaders should also establish leading practices, guided by the principle that AI tools are only as effective as the data they rely on.
The more representative and up-to-date the data, the more accurate the model — and the stronger the results.
Dave Ulmer is APPA’s chief operating officer.
Note: The views expressed by guest bloggers and contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Campus Safety.
