Office expansion is one of the largest capital expenses a company faces. Leases, fit-outs, furniture, and ongoing operational costs can quickly add up to millions over a multi-year horizon.
Before signing on for more square footage, organizations can adopt privacy-first people sensing and spatial intelligence to measure actual workplace needs, optimize existing space, and delay or dramatically reduce expansion costs. This article explains how privacy-first people sensing works, why it reduces real estate spend, and how to implement a program that delivers measurable savings without compromising privacy.
People sensing is the use of sensors and analytics to measure human presence, movement, and space usage in buildings. Spatial intelligence is the analysis layer that turns sensor data into actionable insights for real estate, facilities, and workplace teams.
Privacy-first people sensing refers to systems designed from the ground up to protect individual privacy. Key characteristics include:
These approaches let organizations understand how space is used without tracking or identifying individual employees.
Office expansion costs extend beyond raw square footage to include build-out, furniture, additional energy and maintenance, and often higher lease rates. Privacy-first people sensing reduces these costs by enabling smarter, data-driven decisions:
Together, these levers can produce multi-million dollar savings across a portfolio of offices over time.
Common levers to achieve savings include space reduction, lease renegotiation, operational cost reduction, smarter build-outs, and postponed capital expenditures by deferring expansion.
Company A occupies 100,000 sq ft at $50 per sq ft = $5,000,000 annually in rent. People-sensing data reveals average utilization is 60%, with peak demand clustered in 70% of the space. By reconfiguring, enabling hybrid work, and consolidating underused areas, the company reduces footprint by 20% to 80,000 sq ft.
Annual rent savings: 20,000 sq ft × $50 = $1,000,000. Over a typical 5-year lease, this equals $5,000,000—plus additional savings from lower energy and maintenance spend. This example shows how modest utilization improvements can scale into millions in savings, especially for organizations with multiple locations or large leased portfolios.
A disciplined rollout maximizes ROI while maintaining employee trust. Follow these steps:
Identify priority outcomes: avoid expansion, delay lease renewals, cut energy costs, or support a hybrid workplace. Clear goals guide sensor placement, analytics, and KPIs.
Run a short pilot to collect ground-truth data on occupancy, meeting room use, desk utilization, and traffic flows. Baseline data highlights where the biggest opportunities lie.
Choose camera-free, thermal, or other anonymizing sensors that measure counts and patterns without imaging. Ensure edge aggregation and minimal retention to reduce privacy risk.
Translate analytics into actions such as identifying floors or zones for consolidation, reclaiming underused conference rooms, adjusting desk ratios and implementing hoteling, and changing cleaning schedules to frequency-based models tied to actual use.
Create conservative and aggressive right-sizing scenarios with cost projections for rent, fit-out, and operational savings. Use these models to build a business case for deferral or reduction of expansion.
Pilot in a few representative locations, refine sensor placements and dashboards, then scale across the portfolio. Continuous measurement ensures that changes deliver expected benefits.
Privacy management is essential for adoption and compliance: publish a clear privacy policy explaining what is measured and why, share aggregated dashboards with employees demonstrating benefits, limit data retention and anonymize data by design, and provide opt-out or alternative accommodations if necessary.
Track these KPIs to quantify savings and inform decisions:
These metrics help make the case to finance and leadership, enabling data-driven approvals to reduce or delay expansion.
People sensing delivers more value when integrated into broader building systems and workplace programs:
Integration increases automation and reduces manual monitoring, which multiplies operational savings.
Data alone won’t deliver savings without workplace change. Key actions include:
Trust is built through transparency: explain privacy protections and how data is used to benefit employees.
When evaluating providers, prioritize:
Companies that specialize in privacy-first people sensing combine technical rigor with real estate domain expertise to deliver both compliance and cost outcomes.
Expanding office space without accurate insight is expensive and risky. Privacy-first people sensing gives organizations the factual basis to optimize existing real estate, postpone or eliminate expansion, and cut operational costs while protecting employee privacy.
Combine anonymizing sensor hardware, spatial analytics, stakeholder alignment, and solid change management to convert utilization improvements into millions in savings. Start small with a baseline pilot, measure the right KPIs, and use those results to inform right-sizing and lease strategies. With the right approach, privacy-first people sensing becomes a strategic lever that protects budgets, people, and privacy.
West Coast, US
800 Airport Blvd
Burlingame, CA 94010
East Coast, US
501 Mass Ave
Cambridge, MA 02139
Japan
CIC, 1 Chome-17-1 Toranomon,
Minato City, Tokyo 105-6415
