At its 3000 person King’s Cross building in London, Meta has embarked on a process of technological development that will see it become one of the most technologically advanced workplaces in the world. Speaking at the recent UnWorking Conference hosted at their office, Meta unveiled some of their latest thinking around technological innovations.

Smart Room Booking

Broadly speaking, Meta has been trying to unify more of its data sources to provide a more accurate picture of the workplace – with a view to understanding the workplace better. It has been pulling together data from various systems including wayfinding, badging, status, VC suites and its internal messaging platform. Using all these data sources together has allowed Meta to provide services to office users that optimise the real estate and improve their experience.

For example, Meta has noticed that meeting rooms are being used very differently following the pandemic. People convene more regularly, putting a lot of additional demand on meeting rooms and ultimately causing them to be used less efficiently, with lots of no-shows. Using data from the sources mentioned, Meta has created a system that messages people when they are running 5 minutes late for meetings, asking them if they still need the room and releasing it if they do not. For co-located 1 to 1 meetings, the Smart Room Booking system asks if they really need a meeting room or could use a more flexible, non-bookable space. People are also nudged if they have not entered the building that day, or if they have updated their status to be out of the office. By trialling automated room cancellations in the event of people not being in the office that day, Meta has achieved 3% room cancellation. Meta is also looking to target people who constantly miss meetings and book spaces to use as offices rather than meeting rooms.

The Office Guide

Meta has also created a bespoke platform that aims to deliver an excellent workplace experience for all users. The Office Guide platform has the aim of making everything as easy as possible for office users. It incorporates a status message, showing the location intention of employees for that day, to guide choices in how to meet. It also shows the best transportation routes to the selected office, events, menus, facilities and who else is in the office that day. This prompt helps people connect more easily without having too many planned meetings. The platform therefore drives good experience right from the start of the work day, all the way through the office. Once in the office, the guide also has wayfinding functionality, showing available rooms and allowing booking. This system removes significant obstacles from the work days of office users, making them more productive as they waste less time on organisational tasks.

Artificial Intelligence

All of these innovations are based upon Meta’s ability to use its data, and AI has been a fundamental part of that. Meta has used AI to help sort and catalogue all of its workplace data, making it accessible to a range of other systems that are used in the above features. Meta is also developing an AI system that uses a large language model (LLM) to quickly sort through all of the available data to fulfil user requests, ensuring that specialists and leadership can quickly get the exact data they need, tailored to their needs, rather than wading through lots of unnecessary information or requiring extensive manual processing by data specialists. AI is also being used to improve experience of the site, by helping to analyse user sentiment across the various sources available to provide a holistic view of sentiment.

Virtual & Mixed Reality

Meta is also pioneering new virtual and mixed reality services that enable office users to have a high-quality collaboration experience no matter where in the world they are. With remote working holding the potential to be somewhat isolating, Meta set out to create an experience that would bring people together and enable full participation regardless of location.

This is enabled by cutting edge Meta technology, such as their Horizon Workrooms, which are collaboration spaces that use the Meta Quest Pro (their VR headset) to improve the virtual meeting experience. This program consists of an immersive virtual reality experience that incorporates a range of collaboration tools (e.g. whiteboarding) as well as avatar-based interactions that create a more natural experience. It even supports events that can bring people together across the world and mixed reality participation so that people without VR headsets can join those who have them.

The Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, are another pioneering piece of tech in use at Meta. , The glasses provide an all-in-one audio, recording, viewing and streaming platform enhanced with Meta AI to enable enhanced voice features. These enable Meta office users to have an always-on virtual assistant that can help people plan their day, capture content and even create new content. Currently this is only available in the US and Canada but is due to be rolled out to the rest of the world soon.

The virtual reality systems are not limited to users of the existing workplace. Meta is also using virtual reality as a way of bringing potential new spaces to life, simulating the proposed features of new buildings. This has the huge advantage of testing spaces out before embarking on the lengthy and expensive process of actually fitting them out.

Conclusion

Meta is still exploring how best to leverage the most useful new workplace technology, but is a front-runner in this endeavour, already incorporating significant amounts of technology that would have been considered science fiction only a few years ago. In addition to the impressive technologies that are being used, Meta is also using its data in innovative ways, bringing together a range of data sources that can all be used to measure and improve the workplace in real time. Given its already impressive progress in these areas, it will be exciting to see what is next for Meta.

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