AI Work Order Intake Helps Facilities Teams Capture Better Data Before Dispatch

Facilities teams are stretched thinner than ever. Under industry-wide capacity constraints, mundane tasks, like figuring out exactly which light is broken, often fall through the cracks. Now, AI is stepping in to do that routine intake, letting humans focus on actual repairs.

Mike McClure is the National Facilities Manager at Emser Tile. Over 15 years with the building materials company, he guided the transition from manual tracking to CMMS-driven operations. Today, he's a hands-on user of AI features inside Fexa, his CMMS platform, relying on the software to structure work orders, support vendors, and keep a lean team on top of its workload. To McClure, AI isn't some sci-fi disruption; it’s just the next logical tool in the belt.

"It's no different than if you were doing this 15 or 20 years ago, managing stuff off an Excel sheet. I think this is just another phase. These are tools in our toolbox to help us become more efficient, better at our jobs, and provide better solutions to make sure end users are taken care of," says McClure. For early adopters, work order intake is becoming an active, automated screening process. The system queries users for details, improving work order data quality before a human ever touches the request.

• Shedding light on tickets: "We used to get tickets simply stating the light was out," McClure says. "Now AI is prompting the appropriate questions, like where the light is out, how many are out, and if we need a ladder or a lift. It gathers the information that both myself and vendors really need to complete it on a first go-round." The automated triage process scales to specialized programs—as long as humans teach the AI the rules. "We didn't at first give the AI that knowledge base, but now we've added it in."

• The 'wow' factor: Better intake frequently improves first-time vendor resolution rates and reshapes communication with partners. Third-party vendors often arrive on-site with the exact parameters they need to finish jobs in a single trip. "The more they see our tickets coming through with the detail coming out of the AI, they're shocked too," McClure says. "Their reaction is essentially, 'Holy crap.' It is just a new world for everybody."

Rolling out new tech means tackling a classic hurdle: getting humans to actually use it. When staff point out that AI intake feels slower on the front end because of the extra questions, McClure validates the friction. He uses those moments to coach his team on the downstream benefits, modeling the urgency of AI fluency through his own upskilling.

• Coaching the skeptics: A recent concern from a branch manager highlights the perceived time burden of AI ticket submission. McClure used the moment to map out the back-end value. "Maybe AI takes a little more time because it's asking more questions on the front side, but what it resolves on the backside is exponential compared to the time they're putting in."

• Hitting the (digital) books: McClure pursues formal AI certifications from Google and IBM to lead by example, positioning facilities managers to begin collaborating on future AI capabilities. "The more we understand AI and how it can help our day-to-day, the better we can express that to companies like Fexa to help generate the features that are going to help us in the future," he says.

As fluency grows, AI is moving beyond standard maintenance workflows. McClure notes that augmenting creative workflows has sped up project timelines for tasks like showroom design. Looking ahead, he wants to work directly with software vendors to build an active, predictive virtual assistant embedded straight into his daily operations.

• Minutes, not weeks: "I took a photo as we did a site walk and gave the AI all this information," McClure says of a recent project. "I showed it some of our millwork and asked it to throw something together. The fact that it could do that in a matter of minutes versus days or weeks to come up with a design process that people can look at and get a visual is awesome."

• Paging the AI assistant: Cultivating AI as a virtual assistant allows lean teams to execute the follow-up work they lack the personnel to manage. "I envision an AI assistant inside our CMMS," McClure says. "Not just a human touch, but an actual assistant mining the data and saying, 'All right, you haven't touched this work order, what do you want me to do with it? Should we send an email to the vendor? Should we email the branch team to find out what's going on?'"

For practitioners like McClure, facilities management is moving toward a practical partnership, with humans and AI working side-by-side. "It's a great tool, and the more you learn, the more it learns," he says, "and so we'll just keep growing together."