The talent and labor shortage in facilities management (FM) is a top concern today, as shown in the National Fire Protection Association’s Industry Trends Survey and ManpowerGroup’s 2025 Global Talent Shortage Survey. In ManpowerGroup’s survey of 40,413 employers across major industries in 42 countries, 74% of global employers said they are struggling to find the skilled talent they need.
The aging workforce is contributing to the facilities management labor shortage. Over 68% of facility operators and technicians in the United States are above the age of 45, and 21% of them remain active beyond retirement age. As people leave the workforce, employers have to fill their positions, address change management, and train their successors to ensure they are equipped to succeed.
However, when so much critical information resides in the minds of senior staff rather than information systems, change management and training are difficult. Implementing digital transformation and modern facilities management systems can help address the FM labor shortage challenge and usher in a new generation of employees who are ready to succeed.
Digital Transformation and Operational AI Can Help Attract, Train, and Retain Talent
Digital transformation is integrating digital technology into all areas of a business to improve agility, customer experience and satisfaction, operations, insights, and actions. Operational artificial intelligence (AI) delivers efficiencies into business operations by automating, optimizing, and enhancing processes. It can provide some of the solutions for the labor shortage in facilities management. Working with modern Internet of Things (IoT), AI, analytics, visualization, and automation technologies enabled by digital transformation can help attract, train, and retain talent, as well as ease change management when employees move to different roles or retire. By digitizing operational technology (OT) assets such as HVAC, meters, lighting, pumps, and valves, and by elevating business processes through operational AI, organizations can open a virtually limitless range of opportunities for insights and employee engagement, training, and empowerment.
Modern Facilities Management Systems Can Also Help Address the Labor Shortage
Facilities management includes an interesting and complex mixture of operational technology and information technology (IT). But it may not appeal to the next-generation workforce if facilities management systems run on legacy, on-premises technology silos. Most of those entering the workforce want to work with modern systems on cloud-based platforms, rather than maintain legacy systems, to keep pace with information systems and technology.
FM professionals can use modern facilities management systems and their embedded AI anywhere on any common devices to create digital twins of their facilities, monitor and visualize all OT assets, and generate virtually limitless insights, suggestions, and actions.
The modern digital twin—enhanced with embedded operational AI—ingests, validates, transforms, and models complex spatial data (e.g., BIM, CAD drawings), static data (e.g., riser diagrams, single-line diagrams, warranty and maintenance service information and records, warranty records, test and balance reports, O&M manuals), and real-time data from diverse sources into a unified knowledge graph. This enables advanced AI-driven insights, impact assessments, and intelligent actions, including automation and remediation.
While traditionally seen as expensive and complex with high setup costs, that perception is outdated. Today’s next-generation solutions can be delivered as true enterprise SaaS: fast to deploy, available with no setup costs and simple, pay-as-you-go subscription pricing.
FM professionals can leverage those digital twins for predictive maintenance, anomaly and fault detection and management, and optimizations based on occupancy, weather, and energy conditions for cost savings and sustainability. Modern facilities management systems with AI can free humans from repetitive and tedious tasks to focus on creative thinking and decision-making, potentially contributing to higher job and career satisfaction and more optimal performance in the process.
Additional capabilities of modern facilities management systems that can help attract and retain talent include:
- Interactive and generative reporting: Modern facilities management systems with embedded generative AI allow FM professionals to ask questions about current or historical performance and receive natural language responses with relevant visualizations—complementing traditional dashboards. These insights are generated directly from the system, which stores all performance data and understands asset-level details, system relationships, and context. This represents a significant improvement over manual reporting methods, which are slower, labor-intensive, and prone to error.
- Personalization: System views and permissions can be tailored to individual roles or user groups. For example, FM professionals responsible for a specific set of buildings or systems (e.g., HVAC) can customize their interface to focus only on relevant data. Other users see and interact with the system according to their own responsibilities and access levels.
- Granularity: Digital twins incorporating all architectural drawings, OT assets, and their design and performance specifications enable FM professionals to view their facilities in detail in 3D from wherever they are. This enables them to assess whether assets are performing to spec and transforms facilities management by allowing insights to be visualized and explored in spatial context.
- Rapid ROI: Modern facilities management systems can also uncover and realize energy savings quickly, enabling FM professionals to demonstrate the value of these systems and their decisions.
- Application programming interfaces: APIs enable integration with any external system or data source required for information, monitoring, and insights.
- No-code and low-code environments: These tools lower the technical barrier, allowing users without coding experience to customize and extend facilities management system functionality. This expands the talent pool and empowers more professionals to contribute meaningfully without formal programming skills.
Modern Facilities Management Systems Provide Efficiency, Flexibility, Scalability, and Stability
The new generation of facilities management systems, powered by digital twin and operational AI technologies, helps address the labor shortage through greater efficiency, scalability, and ubiquitous access. By consolidating data and control in a single platform, organizations can support multiple locations with fewer professionals. Ubiquitous access also broadens the talent pool—enabling FM professionals to work remotely and organizations to recruit nationally or globally.
Modern facilities management systems also provide stability to better address disruptions including blackouts, illnesses, layoffs, leaves, natural disasters, and recessions. With all facilities information in a digital twin with ubiquitous access and storage in redundant, geographically diverse and distributed data centers, organizations can better address such challenges. Plus, FM professionals tend to prefer to work with systems that provide optimal support during disruptions.
FM Involves Most Vertical Industries and Many Technologies
In addition to the benefits of working with modern facilities management systems, FM professionals can work in any vertical industry, because almost every industry requires facilities including airports, schools, hospitals, stadiums and arenas, retail stores, residential and office buildings, factories, warehouses, restaurants, and theaters. FM professionals also manage all aspects of a facility, including HVAC, plumbing, electrical, security, emergency management, shipping and receiving, construction, mill work, contractors, vendors, and internal teams. There is no other profession that can combine and nurture so many skills in any vertical industry, which also should attract and retain talent.
Digital transformation and modern facilities management systems can help address the labor shortage, change the way the world manages buildings for a more sustainable future, and create a world where every building on the planet responds to the people, purpose, and environments it serves.
Bert Van Hoof is the CEO of AI-driven platform provider Willow.
ALSO READ: Preparing for Gen Z in Facilities Management