There's a saying that all markets eventually move to efficiency. After a couple of decades in competition law and market design, I'd add the step most people skip: markets go to opportunity first, then to power, and only then – if someone forces it – to efficiency.

Building operations, a global services market worth more than US$1.5 trillion a year, has been living out that exact sequence. The efficiency phase isn't theoretical anymore. It's happening now, and AI is why it's arriving faster than anyone expected.

Same old cycle, new industry

Owners started where every infrastructure industry starts: in-house and fragmented. The first great shift was Opportunity. This came in the form of outsourcing: shared resources, specialist expertise, one throat to choke. And it genuinely worked: better access to talent, built-in redundancy, best practice carried across clients, smaller internal teams.

Then it stalled. Costs stopped falling, and the largest suppliers used their scale to reposition and capture more of the pie they'd created. Hardware based building management systems (BMS) providers became "Smart Building Systems," then “Building Automation Services” to move further out into services. Facilities Management (FM) became “Integrated Facilities Management,” absorbing the client's technology stack along the way.

The advantages persisted. So did the questions nobody was paid to ask: “Is what is happening in my buildings lost in the day-to-day of vendor and service provider systems?  What system governs and improves the supply chain's performance? Is performance information genuinely transparent, or does some nuance naturally get lost along the way?"

And when performance falls short, the real questions are: "What can actually be done about it right now, and how real are the exit options once you factor in switching costs and half-measures like staff transfers?

Transparency got us here. It won't get us further.

Buyers eventually did what buyers in every infrastructure sector do: they invested in their own technology to see where the money was leaking and build the case for change.

That's where most of the market sits today; better dashboards and clearer reporting. And here's the uncomfortable truth about it:

Transparency shows you the problem but doesn't change the supply chain to efficiently resolve those problems. It's a better-lit version of the same misalignment.

By efficiency I mean something specific: meeting user and asset needs at the lowest whole-of-life cost – economic, environmental and administrative – with transparent information, accountable decision-making and low-friction ways to act.

Real efficiency takes courage

Change only sticks when it's better for the people being changed, not just for the people driving it. And here's what most commentary on this market gets wrong: the efficiency phase isn't being done to the supply chain. The most interesting moves right now are being made by it.

The best FM, commissioning and building services firms aren't waiting to be disrupted. They're rebuilding their delivery model around verified outcomes, offering services the old model couldn't support, and winning tenders on evidence their competitors can't produce. Accounting went through this with cloud platforms; legal services is going through it now. In both cases, the firms that moved first didn't lose work to the technology – they took work from the firms that hesitated.

Agentic AI is what makes this phase possible. Not another reporting layer on top of the transparency buyers already built – the mechanism that closes the loop: finding true causes, putting dollars where the value actually is, and cutting the cost of getting things done, not just the cost of seeing what's broken.

This isn't a prediction. Across the portfolios already running closed-loop operations, 97% of identified actions now verifiably complete, velocity of successful resolution of problems is up 30-55%, and the results are showing up where anyone can check them: in public NABERS and published GRESB portfolio trajectories.

It takes courage because it never happens evenly. Every market restructure creates winners and losers – on both sides of the contract. The dividing line isn't owner versus provider. It's the firms that move first versus the firms that wait for certainty that never comes.

What winning looks like

For owners, winning means predictability in meeting their increasing goals, partnering with the best instead of defending an incumbent relationship out of habit, and building closed-loop, accountable systems instead of another dashboard.

For providers, winning means getting to the new model before your clients ask for it – walking into the next tender with verified outcomes on the record, new services to offer, and your engineers equipped rather than exposed. At CIM, we've moved well past working only with owners; some of the most ambitious deployments we run today are with supply-chain innovators embedding these efficiency gains into their own ways of working.

The pitch that works isn't, "trust us." It's, "We have the best capability to drive this the way that works for you — and we'll show you the evidence of our work so you keep your confidence." Clients already know they need to change. What most don't know is who can get them there.

The firms that move first, owners and providers alike, won't just capture more of the pie. They'll reshape what the pie looks like.

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If you run a portfolio: we've built a benchmark from public NABERS and published GRESB data showing the gap opening between portfolios run on closed-loop systems and the rest. No pitch attached – the data is public or published, you may as well have it. Message me and I'll send yours.

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If you run buildings for clients: we're working with a small group of firms building their delivery around verified outcomes – new services, new evidence, same team. If that's the direction you're taking your business, I'd genuinely like to compare notes. Message me.