AI and machine learning are becoming increasingly important elements in many types of industries and the investments are increasing. This goes also for smart buildings, according to a new market report from Memoori.
Even though the organic sales growth of new AI powered solutions will be responsible for the majority of the expected growth in the market, it will also be driven, in part, by AI taking responsibility for an ever-greater proportion of existing building systems already in operation. This is one of several conclusions in the Memoori market report ”AI & Machine Learning in Smart Commercial Buildings – global market prospects from 2020 to 2025”.
AI devices will increasingly displace older generations of edge devices, and AI powered analytics will displace some more traditional forms of software analytics being sold today, according to Memoori.
The report estimates that the market for AI & machine learning in smart commercial buildings generated total revenues of 1.11 billion dollars in 2020, and forecast it will grow by 24.3 per cent CAGR through to 2025 nearly tripling in value to approximately 3.3 billion dollars by 2025.
The majority of hardware revenues are from edge devices, particularly the various kinds of AI enabled camera device, according to Memoori: “Other market analysis dedicated to the wider market for AI solutions show a much heavier weighting towards software generated revenues, but the relative importance of computer vision solutions for the smart buildings market means hardware revenues constitute a solid proportion of the market and will continue to do so going forward.”
Memoori estimates that hardware revenues currently make up 35.5 per cent of the market.
At the same time, a widely discussed subject in the physical security industry is the importance to integrate different systems to be able to handle smart buildings from one single platform. And another hot topic is greater flexibility in the buildings – something that undoubtedly has been accelerated during the pandemic.
When offices are no longer seen as the obvious workplace for people to go to every day, but perhaps only a few or one day a week – adapting the buildings to the needs of the organisations and the people populating them, becomes much more important.
Part of this is occupancy management, where, for example, by collecting data from access control systems and security cameras, it becomes possible to adjust ventilation, heating, lighting, etc. based on how many people are in a building or in specific spaces of buildings and when. Memoori states that the market for AI enabled Energy Management & Sustainability services is growing fast and attracting a good number of new market entrants.
Access control as a service is becoming increasingly popular worldwide. Memoori’s report “The Physical Security Business 2020- 2025” estimates the global market for Access Control as a Service (ACaaS) was worth 620 million dollars in 2019. As much as 40 percent of these installations are located in North America. Global demand is expected to increase to 1.6 billion dollars by 2024.
Marcus Täck, Vice President Marketing, Scanbalt, Dormakaba, believes that the transition to more service-based business models has accelerated during the pandemic and that it will result in new solutions like booking services, both for workplaces, offices and the like.
“The offices will be more of a meeting place in various forms”, he says.
And it will put new demands on the various systems that exist in buildings today and make the integration of the various systems even more important. Companies that have not traditionally been part of the physical security industry can play a big role here.
Greater flexibility also means that it becomes important to keep track of the identities of those who are in a building. Pierre Parrman, CTO at Seriline, states that the same person often can have 3-4 different identities in the same access control system, which makes managing the identities more complicated.
