Equiem & The Building Handbook
An AI force multiplier for property teams


Background: Office buildings and mixed use campuses are complex miniature cities with armies of people responsible for the reliable operation of all the systems, and ultimately responsible to ensure that the people who work, live, and do business on site have a five star experience. Office building owners want to provide this five star service on a one star budget.
Problem: Every office building has a handbook that's full of useful information that nobody ever reads, and office managers and property managers spend their days answering the same questions and resolving the same issues. Tight budgets and labor shortages mean that these teams are more short-staffed than ever.
Solution: We implemented a feature that I called "we enslaved a robot and forced it to read the building handbook so you don't have to." The building's app features a prominent "ask me anything" prompt that's powered by a large language model that's trained on the building handbook and other content such as the event calendar and newsletters. The system has an accessory that reviews and tags images, so if someone asks a question like "are there yoga classes at the fitness center" but no yoga was mentioned in the text, but a photograph of yoga was listed, we would be able to display that image and its automatically-generated caption. We also use the captions to help visually impaired users interact with the online resources via assistive devices. (Content creators are terrible about including alt tags with their images, so we got a robot to do that too).