AI moves from buzz to backbone in real estate operations, says Facilio founder

Tahawul Tech

5 days ago

Facilio's CEO, Prabhu Ramachandran, on how AI is transforming compliance, visibility, and performance across building portfolios.
Artificial intelligence is redefining real estate operations by addressing the everyday challenges faced by facility managers—missed SLAs, compliance gaps, and delayed issue resolution. Facilio is harnessing AI and IoT to unify disconnected systems, enabling smarter, faster decision-making across entire portfolios. Prabhu Ramachandran, Founder and CEO of Facilio, explains how the company is helping real estate and FM firms achieve measurable impact through a connected operational platform, with the Middle East emerging as a key region for success.
Interview Excerpts:
AI in real estate has moved beyond buzz—how is Facilio enabling measurable impact across compliance, issue resolution, and operational visibility?
AI is finally delivering on its promise in real estate—not as a futuristic idea, but as a hands-on tool to solve the everyday bottlenecks that facility teams deal with. Facilio brings AI into the heart of building operations, where the pain is real: delayed resolutions, missed SLAs, compliance scrambling, and a lack of real-time visibility. We are building AI capabilities to help facility managers prioritise work orders, assign the right technician instantly, surface hidden patterns in compliance failures, and spot risks before they escalate. Instead of hunting through spreadsheets or chasing teams for updates, managers can now see exactly where things stand—and more importantly, what actions will move the needle. The result? Problems are resolved faster, audits become routine instead of stressful, and teams stay ahead of issues rather than reacting to them. This is how AI becomes a daily operational advantage, not just a buzzword.
You often say leaders don't need more tech, but connected tech—how does Facilio bridge people, processes, and systems using AI and IoT?
Facility management has no shortage of tools—just a shortage of connected intelligence. Teams juggle a mix of apps, vendor systems, emails, and spreadsheets. The problem isn't lack of technology; it's that the systems don't talk to each other, and people are left bridging the gaps manually. Facilio changes that. Our platform brings AI and IoT together to stitch those silos into a single operational brain. Work orders, technician skills, asset health, energy usage, vendor response—all of it flows into one connected layer. AI then steps in to make sense of it, recommend actions, or trigger workflows in real time. This gives every team member—from a technician in the field to a regional ops lead—the ability to act faster, smarter, and with full context. It's not about automating tasks in isolation, but about orchestrating operations with intelligence.
As cost-cutting hits its limits, where do you see the biggest opportunities for AI to unlock long-term value in real estate portfolios?
Most portfolios have already squeezed the easy cost levers—cutting headcount, renegotiating contracts, deferring maintenance. But that's not sustainable. The next frontier is performance at scale—and that's where AI shines. AI helps shift from managing buildings to optimising them. Think: predicting which equipment is likely to fail next week, identifying which vendors are underperforming, spotting which sites have hidden compliance risks or missed revenue. It transforms operations from reactive to precision-led. The biggest long-term value? Visibility and control at the portfolio level. Instead of managing one building at a time, you can steer dozens—or hundreds of sites with the same clarity and consistency.
'AI isn't just helping teams do more with less—it's helping them do better with what they already have.'
Why is a unified operations platform the missing piece in facilities management, and how is Facilio filling that gap?
Facilities management has been stuck in fragmented workflows for too long. One app for work orders. Another for energy. A third for compliance. The result? Gaps, delays, and missed opportunities. What's missing is a single operating layer that ties it all together. Facilio was built to be that layer—a real-time platform where operations, maintenance, sustainability, and compliance come together, guided by live data and AI. This unified model doesn't just reduce tool sprawl. It unlocks a new way of operating—where every decision is informed by context, every process can adapt in real time, and every stakeholder (internal or external) works from the same source of truth. That's how we help teams stay ahead, not just keep up.
In the Middle East, AI is already driving results—can you share examples of how Facilio is helping FM firms exceed compliance without added overhead?
The Middle East is leading the charge in modern FM, especially in high-performance portfolios. We've seen forward-thinking customers embrace AI not just for innovation's sake, but to solve everyday pains—especially around compliance and reporting. Instead of manually tracking SLA breaches or scrambling to compile ESG data, teams using Facilio now get live dashboards that show exactly where they stand. Faults are flagged before they become failures. Reports are generated automatically. Technicians know what to fix and where to go—before someone escalates the issue.
The impact? Compliance becomes built-in, not bolted on. Teams improve performance without needing more people or firefighting more problems. In one case, a leading commercial development in Dubai unified all their building systems—from HVAC to lifts—under a single pane of glass. Another cut reporting time by 70% and rolled out energy programs portfolio-wide in weeks, not months. As for the third – an FM service provider in the UAE digitised its end-to-end workflows with Facilio—resulting in a 13% boost in workforce productivity, improved SLA adherence, and fully embedded compliance practices. By enabling real-time reporting and empowering mobile teams, they eliminated the need for manual audits across more than 300 buildings. These aren't pilots or ideas—they're results already happening, and they show what's possible when FM leaders choose a platform built for continuous improvement, not just digital record-keeping.