Partnership of Autonomous Vehicles with Autonomous Buildings

COVID has put mobility on hold keeping us on lockdown. Now when we ease up and begin to move around building are becoming the gatekeepers of checking if people are safe to interact with each other. The collision of autonomous vehicles and buildings is becoming a reality.

With lockdown, we work from home (not offices) but which is still a building and we are stopped from moving (with zero mobility) which is an extreme end of the spectrum. The delivery from retail stores replacing us from shopping in person in the stores with the delivery vehicles bringing what we need is a combination state. Now when we go back to work buildings are forced to track each person and personalize our experience to keep us safe from each other. This is not the personalization we were aspiring for but nonetheless it is personalization for each user entering the building.

Technology offering surveillance of people to keep social distance, digital twins geo-fencing equipments that need to be protected when people are not in the buildings and a new reality of what work means when we combined working on the premise to working remote. This is similar to when the Internet began disrupting brick and mortar stores to create and offline+online commerce model. This is the offline+online work model.

How do we navigate this new reality? What can be bring from our pre-covid past to help us and what do we need to let go and what is the cost of this change and what is the cost of refusing to accept this change?

1. Personalize buildings to each person's presence.
Buildings need to track each person on when they are in the building and how much social distance are they maintaining with other people. This will lay the foundation of creating the experience for the user to customize their work environment to their schedule, moods and styles

2. Autonomous Buildings to meet Autonomous Vehicles half-way

As we get back to work, we begin to move around. Autonomous Vehicles are promising new applications to move people with social distancing, for cargo and food delivery in the supply chain and more. They bridge the gap to allow the transition of people to reboot their mobility from working from home to the workplace. This is going to be a new reality combining mobility plus personalized building experience.

3. Cost of the change

We need to let go of old ways of work-space setup and interaction with large meeting rooms. This challenges fully onsite meetings to bring a combination of onsite + remote participant meetings to become more mainstream. It will require office space assignments to be dynamic to adapt to people physically present in the building. The cost of change is going to be about the change in work culture and attitudes to support remote work as a personalized choice of employees. The cost of refusing the change will be loss of employees who will choose companies that support their flexible mobility needs.

What began as a collision of buildings and autonomous vehicles will ease into an equilibrium when the building becomes autonomous and we can have an AI carry the context of users from their vehicles to buildings back to vehicles. It is time for us to reboot to the new reality of combining autonomous vehicles with autonomous buildings.

Sudha Jamthe teaches a PathtoAV as a series of Autonomous Vehicles courses online combined with coaching to help people navigate new career opportunities in the new reality as we transition to autonomous buildings.

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