Continuous learning helps facilities and cleaning professionals make better decisions about smart building technology. As sensors, robotics and artificial intelligence change how services are delivered, teams need enough digital understanding to assess suppliers, use operational data and judge whether an investment improves performance.

Why smart building skills need updating

There was a time when expertise in facilities management, cleaning, engineering and property operations had a relatively long shelf life. You learned your systems, understood your assets, built experience over time and became progressively better at operating them.

It’s certainly not a model that has disappeared, but it is being disrupted.

The technologies entering buildings today are changing more quickly than the assets themselves. A building may stand for the best part of a century or more, while the digital systems operating inside it can become outdated within a few years. Artificial intelligence capabilities can move significantly in a matter of months. Sensors are becoming cheaper, connectivity is becoming more ubiquitous, robotics are becoming more capable and software is increasingly influencing decisions that were once made entirely by people.

This creates a new challenge for the built environment: professional knowledge needs regular updating. In the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers expect 39% of workers’ existing skills to change or become outdated by 2030. This is a cross-industry forecast, rather than a measure of building professionals’ knowledge. [1]

How smart buildings are changing commercial cleaning

For facilities and cleaning professionals in particular, this matters because technology is moving rapidly from being something installed “behind the scenes” by IT teams to something that directly affects how work is planned, delivered and measured.

Consider cleaning. Traditionally, a team might work to a fixed schedule: a washroom is cleaned at a certain time because the schedule says it should be. In a smart building, occupancy information, footfall sensors and service data can help determine where attention is actually required. Autonomous cleaning equipment may undertake repetitive floorcare while people concentrate on higher-value activities. Digital workflows can automatically generate tasks, record completion and provide managers with operational data that was previously difficult to obtain. The International Federation of Robotics reports that its supplier sample recorded more than 25,000 professional cleaning robots sold in 2024, with floor cleaning the main application. [2]

The same transformation is happening across maintenance, energy, security, workplace experience and building management. Berkeley Lab’s Smart Energy Analytics Campaign, covering 104 organisations and 6,500 buildings, documented median annual energy savings of 9% for fault detection and diagnostics. [3] These findings illustrate the value of acting on building data.

The digital literacy facilities teams need

Importantly, professionals do not need to become programmers or data scientists to participate in this change. But they do need sufficient understanding to ask better questions.

What problem is this technology solving? What data does it require? Who owns that data? Does the business case stack up? Does the system integrate with what we already have? Will it genuinely improve the experience of employees or customers? And perhaps most importantly, does it make the people delivering the service more effective?

These are increasingly management questions, not technology questions.

This is why continuous learning has become so important. The objective isn’t just about accumulating lots more technical knowledge. It is to develop technological literacy and understand digital systems well enough to make informed operational and commercial decisions.

Smart buildings are particularly challenging because they sit at the intersection of multiple disciplines. They bring together building systems, operational technology, IT networks, data platforms, cybersecurity, sustainability, workplace experience and increasingly artificial intelligence. No single profession naturally owns all of these areas.

That means learning has to become broader as well as deeper.

A facilities professional who understands the basics of building connectivity can have a more productive conversation with an IT team. A cleaning leader who understands occupancy analytics can challenge whether a proposed service model is genuinely demand-led. A property manager who understands data architecture can question whether ten separate technology platforms are really creating intelligence or simply ten separate dashboards.

The competitive advantage comes less from knowing every technical detail than from understanding how the pieces connect.

Applying learning through Smart Building Bootcamp

This philosophy sits behind Smart Building Bootcamp.

The programme was created because much of the existing education around smart buildings falls into one of two camps. At one end are highly technical courses designed for specialists. At the other are high-level discussions about innovation that describe what technology might do without explaining how it actually works in buildings.

There is an important space between the two.

Smart Building Bootcamp is intended to give professionals a working understanding of the technologies, concepts and decisions shaping modern buildings. Topics range from connectivity, data and cybersecurity through to artificial intelligence, sustainability, workplace technology and operational use cases.

Just as importantly, the emphasis is on application. Technology in buildings should never be interesting merely because it is new. It has to solve a problem, improve an outcome or enable people to perform their work better.

Making continuous learning part of the job

That principle is becoming increasingly important as artificial intelligence accelerates the pace of change again. The next generation of building technology will do more than just provide more information. AI agents, automation and intelligent systems will increasingly interpret information and recommend, coordinate or undertake actions themselves.

For the industry, the response cannot be to wait until every technology has matured before learning about it. By then the conversation will already have moved on.

Instead, organisations need to create a culture in which curiosity and continuous learning are part of professional practice. That means giving people permission to explore new technologies, encouraging teams to share what they learn and helping operational professionals develop enough digital confidence to participate in decisions about the future of their workplaces.

Buildings will continue to become smarter.

The more important question is whether the people responsible for operating them are being given the opportunity to become smarter too.

About the author

Dr Matthew Marson is the founder of Smart Building Bootcamp and author of The Smart Building Advantage. A chartered engineer with a PhD in architecture and technology, he works at the intersection of digital technology, sustainability and the built environment.

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