The expert named the key technological trends of the office market

In Russian offices, digitalization is increasingly ceasing to be an experiment and becoming a tool to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. Management companies are abandoning abstract "smart" solutions in favor of applied technologies — mobile applications for residents, workplace and meeting room reservation systems, room load analytics, and automation of service support. Denis Zhdankin, head of the Digital transformation department at SOK, told Izvestia on January 28.

According to him, the key trend in office real estate is the transition from disparate IT products to managed digital ecosystems. Presence sensors, monitoring platforms for engineering systems, and applications for tenant employees are increasingly being used in buildings. These tools allow you to see in real time how spaces are being used, optimize energy and maintenance costs, and respond faster to user requests. An additional driver of the changes was the hybrid format of work, in which idle areas and inefficient processes turn into direct financial losses.

"Technologies in offices are no longer being implemented for the sake of image. Only those solutions that either reduce costs or make the space manageable and user-friendly take root en masse. The market filters out everything else very quickly," the expert noted.

At the same time, according to Zhdankin, some of the high-profile concepts still remain on the periphery of the market. Full-fledged offices in metaverses, VR spaces for daily work and service robots inside buildings, according to the expert, are not widespread due to the high cost, lack of uniform standards and limited business impact. In the coming years, he believes, demand will focus not on spectacular, but on practical technologies that directly affect operational efficiency.

Digital tools are already being integrated into the daily processes of building operation in the Russian market. They help to reduce staff workload, speed up tenant maintenance, and use the accumulated data to predict the performance of engineering systems. This increases the energy efficiency of facilities and allows you to save resources without compromising the quality of service.

Zhdankin calls the next stage of the digital transformation of offices the introduction of solutions that have not yet become widespread, but for which the market is gradually preparing. These include digital building doubles, AI—based climate and lighting management systems, indoor navigation, RTLS platforms for accurately tracking the movement of people and equipment, as well as office architecture with open APIs.

"These solutions allow systems not only to capture parameters, but also to understand the context: how many people are in the building, how they move, and which areas they use. This approach changes the logic of operation and design, prepares sites for scaling and connecting new services without rebuilding the infrastructure from scratch. More than 80% of commercial real estate managers plan to increase the use of AI to optimize operations, increase energy efficiency and sustainability of buildings," the expert concluded.

Vadim Ivankov, Head of Gazprom ID product at Gazprom ID Operator LLC, told Izvestia on January 18 that unified digital IDs are becoming a familiar tool for users of Russian online services and allow them to log into dozens of platforms with one account at once. Thus, ID performs several key functions at once, without which modern digital services cannot work. It is thanks to identifiers that systems can correctly recognize users and manage their data.

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