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Episode 30 - Part 1 - What is a Smart Building or a digital twin? with Dan Drogman, Smart Spaces
51 Plays1 year ago
In this week's episode, we are speaking with Dan Drogman from Smart Spaces! In part one, we're discussing what is a Smart Building or a digital twin?
Dan Drogman is a software development entrepreneur and CEO of Smart Spaces. He provides leading owners and developers of real estate with smart building solutions.
Smart Spaces enables building owners to add an extra dimension to their services via its internet of things cloud-based platform, smartphone app and digital twin, giving clients 360-degree engagement with and control of their office environment. From a secure automated entry system with Apple Wallet functionalities, to control of lighting and heating, and connecting with the office concierge, the technology is revolutionising the role of the traditional building owner and occupier.
In part 1, we cover:
📊 Optimising workplace environments for people and energy efficiency
🏰 Smart building technology and its benefits
🔋 Smart building technology and energy efficiency.
🧑🤝🧑 What is a digital twin and what uses does it have
📉 Smart buildings, AI, and data analysis
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Transcript
Introduction to Survey Booker Sessions
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Survey Booker Sessions. Tune in to hear from people working in a range of industries and roles to provide you ideas that you can take away and use in your own business. I'm your host, Matt Nally, the founder and director of Survey Booker, which is the leading CRM and survey management system for surveyors.
Interview with Dan Drogben
00:00:15
Speaker
On this week's episode, we've got Dan Drogben from Smart Spaces. So thank you very much for coming on. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
00:00:22
Speaker
That's great to have you on. It was an interesting chatting briefly before this to learn some more. But do you want to give everyone an overview as to who you are and what you do? Yeah, certainly. So I'm Dan Drogon. I'm the CEO and co-founder of SmartSpaces, a smart building operating system running across 75 million square feet.
00:00:40
Speaker
And our purpose at Smart Spaces is to optimize environments for people on the planet. And what that translates to is optimizing how people use the workplace.
Dan's Journey in Tech Industry
00:00:49
Speaker
So that's desk booking, meeting room booking, food ordering, but then connecting that to the building system so we only power spaces on when they're used and don't waste energy when they're empty. Also, I imagine this can be a very interesting episode as we go through everything.
00:01:03
Speaker
I suppose a bit of background. How did you get into it? Yeah, nice. It's an interesting question. So I started in the industry in 2004. I graduated from UAL. So I went to University of Arts and I was studying web design and development. So at that time it was the dot com boom. So I joined UAL in 1998.
00:01:23
Speaker
And yeah, it's a dot com boom. So web designers are getting paid some seriously high salaries. That attracted me. Plus I had a big passion for design and programming. I'd always excelled at IT because my dad got me my first PC when I was about five years old. And that was MS-DOS space. So it was command line. So I sort of had that natural ability. But really what I like to spend my days doing was in paint or Photoshop designing. So web design was the perfect sort of merger of technology and design.
00:01:53
Speaker
and went to study web design and interactive media and we've done some really advanced websites using a technology called Flash. I know Flash died a few years back. Some of my developers here, when we go to conferences, they introduce me as a Flash developer because they know it's a dead technology and they're basically having a dig at me.
00:02:14
Speaker
But obviously, the real sad thing was .com crash. So then I joined the industry, nowhere near the
Birth of Smart Spaces
00:02:23
Speaker
salary that I expected. But what we found was, I actually had a passion for the more technical side, certainly design and user experience is paramount. So we started developing some quite advanced software for the time, 2004, like data rooms to sell assets.
00:02:41
Speaker
intranets for big business parks. That's when we first got the idea, and we didn't obviously know the smartphone would arrive later, but we got the idea of wrapping up the services available to office tenants on a single platform and recording what they use and giving them access to it and allowing for payments and so on. Back then, when we built these intranets, but very embarrassingly, when we attract the amount of people that logged into the intranets,
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, no one used it, and we were very, very upset. We poured our hearts and soul into it. So when we got the second time round, when the smartphone got mass adoption and the app store come around, we actually revisited it. And first of all, this was doing more work for hotels, actually, that offered conference in and meeting room facilities.
00:03:30
Speaker
And they had a lot of aspirations for smart, so they invited us in to meet Apple. And we met Apple and looked at the iBeacon program, which detects where you are and which buildings you're located to and allows us to create prompts in apps and so on. And that's when the genesis of the idea come around.
00:03:48
Speaker
And then fast forward to about 2014, so 10 years later into my career, we had a fantastic opportunity to revisit the intranet projects but utilizing an app and knowing that no one would use the platform in its previous form, we needed to bring those transactional elements in and those elements resulted in access, so mobile access, ANPR access for the car park.
00:04:13
Speaker
booking the gym, booking a meeting room, paying for your lunch. These are all transactional pieces. And if you can make a killer user experience, it makes it easier through the app than the alternative. You've got a user base, you've got product market fit. And that's it. That was the genesis of Smart Spaces. That's fascinating. So what was the big driver then between
00:04:34
Speaker
usage from the internet version to the app version. Is it because it's in your pocket, it's easier to get hold of? Or is it because you're the more forced to use it just because how everything interconnects now? Or is it a mixture of both? Yes, it's a totally mixture of both. Yes. And so I think the internet fell down that actually most people found it easier to email reception and say, I want this room for this time. And so and you're guilty of those processes where
00:05:00
Speaker
you allowed that to happen you rather than push people back to internet and say no you can book yourself self-service they were like no farm will book it for you but i think over time as those operating costs have been squeezed and you no longer have the luxury like someone running your park for you you know there's less staff running these assets than ever
00:05:19
Speaker
You have to be stronger and you have to say no, book it yourself. Plus, I think it's an education piece. I think back then, it hadn't reached maturity.
What Defines a Smart Building?
00:05:28
Speaker
A lot of people hadn't moved to internet banking, so they weren't comfortable with booking things online. They were either scared of it, don't know how to do it. Whereas what we see, even throughout the
00:05:38
Speaker
like the era of the smartphone and it was early doctors to start with but the moment our grannies got smartphones we knew wow we've got access to a much wider audience and they're willing to use and embrace it so yeah I think it's convenience it's actually people understanding how to use it and then the transactional element is just what makes life easy for them. Awesome okay so I suppose that brings us up to the point now where we've got smart buildings so I suppose this is part one then we'll probably discuss
00:06:09
Speaker
what certain things are and then we'll come on to benefits in part two. But I suppose that it's very cool then, what is a smart building? What does that mean? I know we've got smart TVs and...
00:06:18
Speaker
you know, access and stuff in the house. But what's a smart building at its core? Yeah, certainly. So from a commercial aspect, it is a building that has the ultimate user experience. So it's very easy to access the amenities and understand what the amenities are. It offers a fantastic set of amenities, but it optimizes those amenities. And so what that could mean that it will enable you to get from street to seat very fast using your mobile app and using Apple wallets. So you can access that with your smartwatch, you can access with your phone,
00:06:47
Speaker
If your phone battery goes flat, you still can access the building for up to four hours. Now, before you get to the building, you can book your desk, you can book your meeting rooms, you can book your locker, and you also can use the Apple Wallet access to access those facilities as well.
00:07:01
Speaker
Now, all of this records data into the cloud, which then can be analyzed to optimize that. So you can look at your peak times, you can look at your quiet times, you can manage a roster, you can manage neighborhoods. So then when a team member books, you can suggest that they book in the same zone, so they're productive when they're there, they're not just going in and working on their own and not making the most of being in the office. Your time, all these things together on a common user experience, but then tracking it.
00:07:30
Speaker
and more importantly, linking it back to what spaces are online, where are you providing fresh air, where are you providing cooling or heating, and when someone leaves, disabling those. But not doing it too early that you get a complaint that someone's cold at five o'clock and not doing it too late in the morning, that they're cold when they arrive or too hot when they arrive.
00:07:51
Speaker
and also understanding
Smart Spaces Case Study
00:07:52
Speaker
what people like, their preferences. So running one space at 20 Celsius, one space at 21 Celsius, showing that on the desk booking plan, showing how noisy the two environments are, maybe having some warmer lighting in the warmer area, cooler lighting in the cool area, and then give people the ability to choose where they go and then track what they like and then make more of what they like and take away the space they don't like.
00:08:18
Speaker
is tying all these things together onto a common platform and then optimizing. A good case study would be one of our clients started with us in about 2018 at 500 staff. They were predicting expansion, which is really nice. They actually leased an office for 750 people. They've now managed to scale to 1,500 with the same amount of space and they use our software.
00:08:44
Speaker
to facilitate access to that space and then they use sensors connected to our platform to make sure that they're using it as efficiently as possible, which meant that they haven't had to lease more space.
Application of Smart Technology
00:08:56
Speaker
They foresee they won't need to lease more space for another two years, which based on their headcount is a saving of about 1.2 million a year in rent. That doesn't even account for the energy. That's the true thing. It's all about productivity and optimizing things.
00:09:13
Speaker
That's, yeah, fascinating change there. Because I suppose traditionally people would have just gone, right, we're going to have to move into a bigger premises earlier. And of course, people would get familiar with new spaces and decorating and moving. Yeah, big benefits. Is it something that is also used in Resi in similar ways? Is it the key benefits for smart buildings in sort of larger scale commercial hotels, that type of thing?
00:09:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So we are focusing on commercial, but yeah, it definitely has the same application within hotels. I think, you know, people sometimes get it going to their room and the lights don't come on until you put the card in. And so what they do is they put a business card in or they put another card in, keep the lights and HVAC on where they're at. Obviously with the smartphone, we know they're not there. We can disable that space, but we can give them rewards for that. So they don't feel like they're getting tracked
00:10:09
Speaker
unnecessarily that we are doing the ethical thing and not preventing waste, we can give them a reward and say, well, actually, you've saved this much energy, so you've got the percentage of a coffee in reception. So you're getting a payback. And as soon as people get a payback, they're way more open.
00:10:28
Speaker
To sharing that data. So yeah, I think it applies hotels exact same for built around BTR because Yeah, you know again where you're not paying the energy It doesn't affect you financially whether you have the heating on and the windows open in deep winter And so you get people abuse it and but I think if you can incentivize them
00:10:49
Speaker
And that would be providing a fantastic return on investment for saving energy. They'll do it. And I think that's where the same technology falls into resi and hotels. Awesome. Okay. And there's a couple of other things I saw on your website, LinkedIn with
00:11:09
Speaker
smart buildings, which were obviously AI, which I think you kind of touched on in terms of adapt data analysis and we'll come on to in a second, but also digital twins. So I suppose firstly, what's a digital twin and why is it useful within the smart building space?
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, certainly. So the digital twin is a representation of the building in a digital environment. And so if we have all the sensors that make up a building and all the data around a building, we can have a digital replica of that building. And that means that we can simulate things in that environment.
00:11:44
Speaker
So if you want to understand that if you brought the HVAC on 30 minutes later every morning, what would the temperature be when the first person arrives based on our data set we have in our cloud, you can simulate that in the digital twin. And then that's typically linked to a representation visually. So that could be a 3D model. So you can actually see the fabric of the building. You can see all the components that give you better understanding of how things work together.
00:12:13
Speaker
But yeah, it's a simulated environment, which is a twin of the building and it will either run real time, so whatever you're seeing in the 3D twin in your browser, you could be on a beach in Barbados, whip your iPad out, load the building up, you can see exactly what's happening in that building on that model at that time.
00:12:32
Speaker
or you can wind back and see what it was like three months ago. You can compare three months to now, or you can look forward and look at the predictive analytics and say, what was the building going to look like in three months time? So yeah, it gives you a virtual environment to test strategies to save energy and improve your building.
Role of AI and Data Analytics
00:12:51
Speaker
That's really interesting because it's very easy to anecdotally think one thing's happening.
00:12:56
Speaker
and try and make decisions based on what you believe is going on versus being able to actually then cross check and go actually now I'm completely wrong. Years ago I worked in supermarkets and I remember in the bakery section you'd often get one thing completely overbaked and ah but people love blueberry muffins.
00:13:13
Speaker
The data doesn't say they do, but that's all going to go in the bin. Next time, follow the stats. We said it because our data is used to order food. We base on our occupancy data and our predictions for occupancy, we will order food. We could go back and look at, say, half term this week, for instance, last year and see what the occupancy levels were and say, okay, we're going to reduce the amount of food we order by 30% to cater for half term.
00:13:40
Speaker
So yeah, it's certainly really powerful for that. And that's why it comes back to this purpose of optimizing environments for people on the planet. It's all around making these savings, but also making life great. You don't want to come back next week and then there's no blueberry muffins if you like your blueberry muffins. So yeah, we can see those patterns and respond to them. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. And then the AI or artificial intelligence side, obviously it's a term that
00:14:08
Speaker
We hear a lot in terms of the common ones, obviously chat GPT and blog writing and what type of stuff, but it's got super powerful uses. I understand in data analysis. So is that what you're using it for then within the smart spaces side of things? Because you mentioned earlier, you've got a lot of data collection and imagine otherwise that just sits there. So part of the benefit obviously with smart buildings is you've got the app and the engagement and ease of using the building itself.
00:14:34
Speaker
I imagine you drive a lot more benefit from the data side. So is that why you're using AI? Certainly, yeah. And that's what provides the insight. And it comes down to a few things. It's like, one, the data set now is so large that you can't really interrogate it as a human efficiently. And then two, we create these fantastic dashboards, but obviously that requires time. And sometimes when you look at the dashboard, it's almost too late. You've missed the opportunity. So yeah, we use ML, machine learning, to provide the predictions on our platform.
00:15:04
Speaker
and we made quite a significant high last year ahead of AI, Alex Michaels, and he's responsible for delivering version two of that, which is going great guns. You've also got obviously the generative AI, which you mentioned, chat GPT, which we use a lot of these tools internally to increase the productivity of our team. Our team will use chat GPT plus a whole host of other services, some connected to Slack, some connected to our Git repository, some connected to the testing in our software.
00:15:31
Speaker
And they will provide code examples or snippets that we can use. So a typical thing would be a formula to understand screen sizes across all the different Samsung devices. That would be a formula that we can get chat GPT to write, move that into our code. We have another tool that will analyze whether that's got any security risks, whether it brings any libraries in that we don't
00:15:53
Speaker
no or open source, which could get us at risk and increase our productivity. And so we're seeing that we can get up to 30% more productivity out of our developers. So we're not looking to replace them with AI. We're supplementing them with AI. It is your assistant. That is the best way to think of it.
00:16:14
Speaker
in the generative side. And then obviously the generative stuff will come into creating posts on our platform as well, because obviously I know that could be time consuming. So we've got that piece. But yeah, the other side of that is the ML machine learning, which is the insights engine.