Workspace Group is transforming property marketing with FME and Generative AI

Meeting the evolving needs of a modern B2B marketing team

Workspace Group is a leading provider of flexible office spaces in London, catering to the evolving needs of modern businesses. They own and manage an impressive portfolio of 77 properties, offering over 5 million square feet of workspace and home to over 4,000 diverse businesses. Workspace Group distinguishes itself by providing a unique combination of flexible lease terms, high-quality spaces, and a vibrant community atmosphere.

As Workspace Group’s portfolio expanded, they faced growing challenges in managing and marketing their property and unit information effectively. There were a few key areas that were consuming time and resources:

• Image Management: The previous image library was stored within SharePoint under an obscure folder system, making it difficult to search for and locate specific images within the website and marketing materials.
• Floor Plan Creation: Outdated and difficult-to-read architectural plans in various file formats made it challenging to generate and share accurate floor plans with potential customers.
• Unit Descriptions: Creating compelling and informative unit descriptions for thousands of individual office spaces was a time-consuming and resource-intensive task.

Streamlining property marketing with FME and AI

To address these key challenges, Workspace partnered with Safe Software partner Avineon-Tensing for their expertise in data integration, automation, digitization, and standardization. Avineon-Tensing leveraged the power of FME and Generative AI to support a range of solutions that have helped to alleviate Workspace’s challenges.

Image migration and management:

FME was used to migrate Workspace Group’s extensive image library from SharePoint to a new DAM system, Bynder. The process of converting downloaded images to consistent formats and uploading them to Bynder with relevant metadata tags was automated. FME also facilitated seamless integration between Bynder, their website, and their CRM, ensuring that the latest images were readily available for marketing and sales purposes.

Floor plan creation:

Workspace Group’s collection of architectural plans in various formats, including PDF and DWG, with varying levels of complexity were tackled using FME. An FME workflow processed the source files to generate AutoCAD file outputs from which essential information like unit boundaries, dimensions, and key features can be extracted. Avineon-Tensing then further standardized these floorplans. FME was also used to both separate floor plans into individual unit PDFs and add additional data including building addresses and suggested occupancy from Google Sheets.

Generative AI to create compelling unit descriptions:

The transformation with the most potential to make a significant future impact is the proof of concept implementation of a Generative AI solution to creating engaging and informative unit descriptions, which will significantly elevate the previous short and generic default copy. Leveraging FME’s orchestration capabilities with transformers including OpenAIVisionConnector and AnthropicVisionConnector and AI services from Anthropic and OpenAI, Avineon-Tensing developed a workflow that will pull relevant data from multiple sources, such as Workspace Group’s CRM, Bynder, and Google Sheets to create unit descriptions tailored to each office space. The compelling text descriptions will include relevant unit feature details and information about the building and surrounding area. The solution will facilitate the creation of hundreds of unique unit descriptions within minutes, eliminating hours of manual copywriting.

FME’s ability to support multiple file formats and orchestrate to and from a range of APIs including images, text, and geographic information was crucial in feeding the multi-modal AI models with the necessary context to produce accurate and engaging descriptions. FME now offers a route to significantly reducing manual copywriting effort for the Workspace Group and ensuring consistent quality and relevance across all unit descriptions while supporting customers and internal teams to sell spaces.

Don’t miss our recent webinar with Avineon-Tensing and Workspace Group to learn more about how FME and AI can revolutionize how you work with data.