What is the biggest drag for facilities managers today? Hint: it’s not crumbling budgets or broken HVAC systems.
It’s the invisible grind of “gray work”, the manual, behind-the-scenes effort employees take on when processes aren’t automated. Gray work is everywhere; it’s in disconnected systems, it’s ad hoc, and it disrupts strong collaboration. Gray work impacts revenue, productivity, and employee frustration, at scale.
In short, gray work is bad for business.
Let’s focus more specifically on commercial and office space management. The industry is already in flux. For example, the recent increase in commercial real estate is a notable trend. Class A office leasing in the central business district is back to 41%, the number it was before the pandemic. As businesses seek ways to expand their office space, facilities managers must be adaptable to the ebbs and flows in occupancy while maintaining a clear understanding of how the building is functioning and meeting the needs of tenants.
Building operations professionals have already been struggling to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the industry. With innovations changing the game by the second, including IoT automation and sweeping digital transformations, the need to modernize and support buildings introduces a new set of challenges. As these pressures converge, three challenges consistently come to light for facilities leaders: digital transformation, skilled labor shortages, and sustainability. Each of these challenges affects not just operations, but also tenant satisfaction, compliance, and long-term building performance. Here’s how they play out in practice.
The Big Three
Facilities managers are juggling more than ever. With tighter budgets, growing compliance demands, and constant pressure to do more with less, they’re facing new problems daily. Every facilities manager faces their own challenges, but three remain consistently top of mind:
Digital transformation: The intention of digital transformation was to simplify facility management, yet it often creates a new kind of chaos. According to a study, 80% of organizations increased investments in digital and productivity tools, yet 59% say it feels harder than ever to be productive. This problem doesn’t come from technology itself. It’s fragmentation. So many new apps promise to fix a piece of the puzzle, but that only leaves facilities managers with a patchwork of systems that don’t communicate with each other. With 75% of professionals admitting that they can’t see their data in one place, building operations managers waste hours reconciling spreadsheets, verifying work orders, or hunting down the latest vendor updates.
Skilled labor shortage: The second biggest issue is people, or rather, the lack thereof. 80% of facilities management teams report being understaffed, which is an alarming statistic. When you lack engineers, skilled technicians, or maintenance staff, small problems can escalate quickly. This means that delayed repairs, increased downtime, and lower tenant satisfaction are likely to be issues that arise as a consequence. For operations managers, this shortage means that with every problem that comes up, they can’t rely on “more hands,” and instead need to think of smarter workflows and automation to handle repetitive, low-value tasks.
Sustainability and aging infrastructure: This third challenge isn’t new, but it’s growing louder. Buildings are responsible for over 30% of global energy consumption, and while most facilities managers are finding ways to comply with aggressive sustainability and ESG goals, they often encounter the problem of aging infrastructure, including HVACs, lighting, and water systems, that are all past their prime. Without proactive maintenance and connected data to inform teams, they end up reacting to failures rather than preventing them. This often leads to wasted energy, emergency repairs, high carbon output, and the inevitable unhappy tenant. Smart maintenance scheduling, driven by IoT data and predictive analytics, enables facilities managers to reduce waste while staying ahead of costly breakdowns.
Facility leaders understand what’s at stake. They know the challenges. Disconnected tools, thin staffing, and aging systems aren’t new, but what’s different now is the urgency to fix them. Technology exists, and the data is there; it’s now an issue of whether the facilities managers will take the step from surviving the daily chaos to building operations that run on clarity, connection, and control.
When a simple repair becomes a major disruption
Imagine a scenario where a system goes down, and a call comes in with a frantic customer trying to understand the issue. Maintenance starts hunting through emails for the last service record, and when they come across the warranty, they realize the parts are out of stock. It is then passed over to procurement. This simple two-hour repair has now turned into a two-day delay due to missing information. An avoidable situation that leaves tenants frustrated before the wrench ever turns.
This is gray work in motion: hidden hours lost to manual lookups, data silos, and missing information. Every disconnected system adds another layer of delay and risk. Downtime increases, while safety and compliance slip.
There’s a way out of this spin cycle. Real customer stories have demonstrated gray work elimination in facilities management by replacing spreadsheets and manual updates with a Facilities Management Intelligence app, which is the most effective solution. Tasks that once took up to a week, such as building new account startup plans, are now completed in under an hour. Meanwhile, real-time dashboards and standardized apps ensure consistent execution, compliance, and visibility across more than 200 sites. This shift freed teams from repetitive work, turning process efficiency into a competitive advantage.
AI’s impact on eliminating gray work
AI can flip the script on gray work. Not as a buzzword or the pipe dreams currently crowding the market, but AI that actually clears the rubble out of the day. Imagine a facilities manager being able to access every inspection report, maintenance log, and contractor update in seconds, without having to chase paper or re-key data. It’s time to focus on safety, efficiency, and scaling operations, rather than chasing the same numbers in three different ways. The real win here is putting AI in the hands of the people who run the show on the ground floor, so they can stop fighting gray work and start running facilities that actually work. And it’s not just automation; AI directly addresses all three of the industry’s biggest challenges: it streamlines digital transformation, offsets the skilled labor shortage, and drives sustainability by enabling smarter maintenance and energy management.
AI isn’t here to complicate things; it’s here to connect them. When you centralize information into a single platform, every system, sensor, and tool can communicate using the same language. That’s how you stop chasing data and start acting on it.
A connected platform can help you not only boost your tech stack but can stretch your team. With a lack of expertise already, having a platform that can do the work of many is a massive time saver. You can now go from five people managing five tools to one person managing a single version of truth.
That’s how facilities managers get smarter about everything they touch. From using more sustainable materials to recognizing when equipment is about to fail, it’s all about utilizing the available technology, but doing so where it makes sense. With AI in the mix, facilities managers can view their buildings with confidence in the future.
Reclaiming time, boosting productivity
Gray work is not just a cost; it’s a liability.
With safety, compliance, morale, and finances all on the line, putting your organization at risk is the last thing you want to do for your organization.
But in 2025, we have the data. We know that investments are being made, but often going to waste due to fragmentation, manual work, and a lack of trust in the data. The easiest wins are often right under your nose: pick one workflow that consumes time (such as vendor compliance or inspection reporting), standardize it, automate it, and integrate it. Gray work is everywhere, but if you start cutting it out piece by piece, you’re already ahead of the leaders who pretend it doesn’t exist.
With AI at the ready, organizations can address their most complex problems. Centralizing information in a single platform will enable seamless communication between tools. This will enable organizations to go above and beyond technologically, while helping those who are affected by the labor shortage. With a centralized platform capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously, the need for multiple people to oversee various tools becomes the responsibility of one person. Through all of these actions, facilities managers will be more informed about their buildings, including which sustainable products to use, when replacements should be made, and how to maintain buildings that are built to last. With AI ready to go, there is so much more that FMs can do now.
Gray work used to be the cost of doing business. Not anymore. The technology is here, the data exists, and the facility leaders who connect it all today will define the future of operations tomorrow.
