The demand for more smart technology in new office construction and upgrading projects is expected to continue unabated for most of the coming decade, says two new reports.
The movement, whose roots can be traced to the mid-1990s with the advent of built infrastructure for the Internet, substantially picked up steam between 2000 and 2010 as more and more offices began to see the use of smart phones, apps, and cloud computing.
Now, smart office features include the building of collaborative workspace, enclosed privacy booths that look a lot like phone booths from the 1960s, and isolated wellness spaces.
Such offices are also increasingly seeing light controls that turn off automatically if no one is in a room, or even on an entire floor of a building.
Global Smart Offices Market Analysis & Trends, published by the Dublin-based Research and Markets, pegs the growth rate of smart office design and construction at around 30 percent per year over the course of the last decade.
At the same time another report, Smart Offices by Product, published by Markets and Markets Research of Pune, India, is predicting that the smart office market will have a dollar value of more than $46 billion, up from $18.8 billion in 2016.
Although all global regions have witnessed smart office growth, according to industry experts, North America is currently leading the smart office market trend worldwide.
By Garry Boulard
