Hooking up workplaces and environments to the world of IoT is often as easy as wiring a building up with IT cabling, says Justin Lee, CEO of real estate firm TheSquareFoot. So long as a workplace can be hooked up to the Internet, it can usually be effectively outfitted with an IoT system—i.e., sensors that generate data talking to each other and sending that data somewhere.
Cost to outfit a workplace ramps up as the workforce increases in size, and while IoT solutions are becoming more common for smaller businesses, IoT solutions for large corporations over 1,000 people are not nearly as commercialized or streamlined yet, says Lee. But we're not yet at a place where real estate understands how to prepare an IoT-ready workplace.
"A lot of this is still very very nascent on the commercial tenant side, playing more of a role in the decision-making process of younger companies. Most commercial real-estate building landlords are just now starting to barely scratch the surface of offering physical setups for IoT," says Lee. "We're a little ways away from determining more than basic connectivity."
