The other day, in an industry discussion about the CAFM Trade Fair, someone quipped, “Are you going to the antiques show?” It was the kind of remark that feels like a friendly jab and at the same time a bit of industry folklore: Facility Management as a dusty back room somewhere between binders, key rings, and endless Excel spreadsheets. And everyone acts as if that’s just the way things are.

Spoiler: it isn’t.

If there are antiques anywhere, they’re usually found where no one deliberately put them, in processes. Because if there’s anything in Facility Management that truly feels outdated, it’s the information gaps, paper floor plans, context-free PDFs, and data that exists somewhere but has no real impact anywhere.

We go because we’re solving the “antiques problem.”

And we’re solving it in a way that’s hard to confuse with an antiques show, unless you also think an AI model is basically the same thing as a rotary phone.

Facility Management isn’t outdated. “Please select a category” is.

The fastest way to turn a ticketing system into a small internal tragedy is to punish the person reporting an issue with endless form fields: category, subcategory, trade, asset, location, urgency, priority, error code, first name, last name, department. In the end, it’s just a broken heater.

That’s exactly where we put AI to work at speedikon Group.

Our AI tool, integrated into speedikon C, automatically analyzes tickets, understands their content and context, and categorizes them so manual sorting is no longer the most expensive part of fixing a fault. The system is intentionally designed so that the person reporting the issue doesn’t have to guess the right category.

And if we’re honest, in many CAFM processes the biggest problem isn’t the software. It’s people’s hands. They’re busy holding tools, wearing gloves, climbing ladders, working through checklists. That’s why issue reporting works hands-free. Just speak the problem into your device and the AI automatically fills in the fields needed for further processing.

Human in the Loop: Why FM Is Not a Job for Autopilot

We could boldly claim, “The AI does everything.” But we don’t. We say the AI makes suggestions and the human decides.

In Facility Management, there are two things you can’t ignore: liability and documentation. Operator responsibility isn’t a buzzword. It’s a legal reality. That’s why our approach is simple. Automate where it helps and build in checkpoints where they’re necessary.

In other words, our AI isn’t a miracle worker. It’s a very well-trained colleague who never gets tired but should still double-check with a human before calling the fire department.

One Photo Is All It Takes

Here’s where the antiques show label fits especially well: when you have to go back to your desk just to properly document a fault report.

Our helpdesk is fully mobile, allowing you to upload photos directly into a ticket to document issues and work on site. The AI analyzes the image and automatically fills in the relevant fields before handing it over to an employee for review and approval. That’s the foundation of what truly matters in FM: verifiable documentation.

Have you chatted with your data today?

The second major antiques problem in FM is fragmented information.

“Where can I find…?” Inspection report, maintenance instructions, operator obligations, manufacturer documentation, revision status, contract, bill of quantities. Everything exists, just scattered.

That’s where inno:docs comes in. It’s an AI-powered chatbot that makes the company’s entire knowledge base accessible to employees. It can be hosted either in the cloud or on premises, making it suitable for environments where sensitive data should not simply be sent off to some cloud.

And of course, inno:docs doesn’t exist in isolation from our speedikon ecosystem. This functionality can also be used with documents from speedikon C.

An end to digital filing cabinets

Then there are the true classics: floor plans scanned and saved as “Scan_003_final_final2.pdf” and dropped into some folder. That’s the so-called digital transformation everyone talks about. The only problem is that finding the right plan in a digital filing cabinet can take longer than digging through a stack of paper.

inno:plan tackles exactly that with AI-powered graphic and floor plan search. It analyzes scanned plans and makes them searchable in seconds via natural language input, including highlighting the relevant content directly within the plan. And importantly, it runs on premises with no mandatory cloud setup.

speedikon VIP: a platform instead of system hopping

And while we’re on the subject of outdated structures, nothing screams 2009 more than data that is everywhere but never in one place.

The Visual Intelligence Platform was designed precisely to solve this. It brings together geometric and alphanumeric data in a central view and breaks down system silos so you’re not ping-ponging between tools but making decisions based on a consistent, unified perspective.

Why we’re going anyway

Because Facility Management is an industry that keeps critical infrastructure, buildings, systems, and processes running every single day, often with tools that belong more to the decade before last than to the year 2026.

So when someone says “antiques show,” we take it as an invitation to demonstrate that modern FM software is no longer just CAFM. It’s a platform, a data space, an assistance system, and increasingly an AI-powered

Picture: macrovector/Freepik.com; Edit: speedikon FM AG