Any day spent exhibiting at a major industry event is never a dull one. Jo Sutherland, Sabrina Stubbs and I knew the IFM Summit London 2026 would be no different as we left Brighton with a fishbowl of sweets, Magenta’s famous putting green and a stack of our latest case study booklets.
As Jo added the final touches to her keynote session, Sabrina and I had the chance to catch up with familiar faces, make new connections and sink a few hole-in-ones. We also managed to attend some brilliant speaking sessions, where the Summit’s theme of ‘breaking the loop’ was loud and clear, regardless of the topic at hand.
The operational loop
Infraspeak’s CMO, Rui Santos Couto began by asking his audience to view management as a prediction problem; whether hiring a recruit or planning a maintenance schedule, managers are constantly making judgements about future outcomes. The Large Language Models (LLMs) now embedded into daily workflows are geared towards this, forming sentences simply by predicting the most likely next word in a sequence. Processing costs for these platforms, Rui explained, fell from around $20 per million tokens in 2022 to just $0.07 in 2025.
But leaders mustn’t assume that the growing ease of prediction will automatically result in better decision making. This was reinforced by a panel immediately after Rui’s talk, featuring Andrew Hulbert, founder at Pareto FM; Jak Whitehouse, facilities manager at DB Cargo; Abbie Neville, senior buyer at Evri; and Joe Lyon, CEO at Thermatic. They explained how poor data continuity and long-term planning still hold many organisations back. Valuable information is often lost when providers change, while fragmented data restricts teams to a cycle of short-term fixes. Breaking FM’s reactive loop, they argued, will require not just better tools but greater transparency and a shared commitment towards preventative measures.
Both sessions also called on operators to be more proactive and confident in the value they provide. Rui used shopping centres as a case in point here: if facilities teams create environments that people want to spend time in, shoppers are more likely to make purchases and generate profit. The panel later added that more human- and experience-led KPIs are required to capture this sort of impact.
The cultural loop
Earlier in the day, Valerie Miller and Christy Smith of the IWFM Women in FM Network delivered a simple yet powerful message: many women have struggled to thrive in FM “not because they weren’t good enough, but because the industry wasn’t good enough for them”.
With FM’s gender gap only increasing with seniority, they were clear that the main issues lie in retention rather than recruitment. The particularly sharp drop-off in female representation at mid-career level provides some explanation here. Too many roles just aren’t flexible enough to work around the caregiving responsibilities that many take on. For an industry that prides itself on adaptability and 24/7 activity, Val and Christy argued that finding a healthier balance should be much easier.
Yet flexibility is only one piece of a much bigger puzzle. Later in the day, the pair returned for an interactive workshop that uncovered ‘the confidence gap’ between female employees and their employers. Although many FM firms believe they’re creating a culture that empowers women, this isn’t what many on the ground feel each day. Splitting the room into these two camps revealed some fascinating insights and helped identify ways to bridge the gap.
The (emerging) AI loop
To round off the event, Magenta’s managing director, Jo Sutherland, delivered a keynote on the social response needed for successful AI adoption in the workplace. She began by taking us back to the gruelling decades of the Industrial Revolution, when the idea of a dedicated two-day break from work – the ‘weekend’ as we know it – seemed unthinkable. Even after Henry Ford introduced the five-day working week in the 1920s, work-life balance remained something workers had to fight for.
Unlike the emergence of the weekend, the AI revolution is not a change we can spend decades navigating. A rapidly evolving way of work requires an equally rapid social response. Jo’s session therefore left business leaders with three key takeaways to share with their teams:
- Refuse the binary of good vs bad – we can be cautious and curious about AI at the same time
- Help people understand how AI tools work, not just how to use them
- Decide what’s acceptable for your organisation and its people
As with the introduction of the weekend, the future of AI adoption will be shaped by the choices we make today
A rounded industry
As Jo’s keynote finished and the 5pm networking session (a.k.a. happy hour) started, Infraspeak’s call to ‘break the loop’ had extended far beyond FM strategy and reactive management. The Magenta team left London feeling optimistic about an industry that cares not only about delivering high-quality technical services, but also about the broader cultural and societal challenges facing its people.
A massive thank you to the team at Infraspeak for inviting us to such an insightful event. We’ll be back next year!
You can read more of our industry event reports through our News & Views page.
Read account manager Eve Dickie’s event report of The Workplace Event & The Security Event here.
