We recently sat down with FM leaders from DB Cargo and Arcus FM, alongside FMJ, for a panel on the growing gap between FM portfolios and FM teams. That conversation is now a practical guide, From Coordination to Capacity and the problem it tackles is one every FM operations leader will recognise.
FM portfolios are growing faster than FM teams. More sites, more contracts, more client expectations, but headcount isn't growing to match. The result is a coordination gap: experienced FM professionals spending a disproportionate amount of their time managing information flows rather than managing outcomes.
The scale of the problem is measurable. In askporter's 2026 UK FM Survey of 250 senior facilities management leaders, 94% said their teams rely on multiple, fragmented systems to run day-to-day operations, and 76% named that fragmentation as their single biggest source of operational inefficiency.
Coordination overhead is the administrative and communications work that sits between a job being raised and a job being completed: logging requests across multiple channels, triaging and prioritising manually, dispatching jobs to the right operative or contractor, chasing SLA compliance, and re-keying the same data between systems that don't talk to each other.
None of it is complex work. All of it is time, and most FM teams are still doing it by hand.
We heard the same frustration described two different ways on a recent panel with FM leaders from DB Cargo and Arcus FM. As Alan Wright, Chief Technology Officer at Arcus FM, put it: "One of my colleagues describes it as the swivel chair, where you take from one system and apply it into another. That's just wasteful."
AI in facilities management isn't replacing operatives. It's automating the coordination work that happens between a reported issue and a resolved job: work order triage and intake, job dispatch and scheduling, client and stakeholder updates, and SLA compliance monitoring with automated escalation when deadlines are at risk.
The effect is structural, not cosmetic. When AI absorbs coordination overhead, FM teams gain capacity: the ability to take on more sites and contracts without a proportional increase in back-office headcount.
The gap between AI tools that get adopted and AI tools that get shelved is rarely about the technology. It's about how teams are brought along — operatives, managers and clients all need to understand what's changing, what isn't, and what it means for their day-to-day work. FM teams getting this right start with one coordination problem they can solve today, and build trust through demonstrated outcomes rather than promised ones.
We turned our panel discussion with DB Cargo, Arcus FM and FMJ into a practical guide for FM operations leaders: what coordination overhead is actually costing FM teams, where AI is already earning its place in production, and how to get your team to adopt it rather than shelve it.
[Download the guide: From Coordination to Capacity →] https://share-eu1.hsforms.com/1K8-HGrujSa6lnHiViPe3Bw2wwio