Put AI to Work in Facilities Management: Introducing Ecotrak’s EMA Tool

It feels like AI is everywhere right now — every headline, every podcast, every conversation. But despite the hype, there is still confusion. What's real, what's just noise, and what actually matters for your business?

There are practical, real-world ways that AI can help support facilities management. If AI is already helping you in your daily life through tools like ChatGPT or other platforms, what can it do for your business operations? Read on to discover how AI and machine learning are being put to work inside Ecotrak for successful facilities management.

Using AI in Facilities

AI is already being used in many of your day to day tasks, from navigating using Google Maps to suggesting what movie you might want to watch next on Netflix. But as quickly as things are changing, there are a few basics to understand first.

To sum it up, AI is the big picture. Machine learning is how it learns. To go deeper, Deep Learning is a powerful approach within machine learning, and Language Learning Models (LLM), one of the newest breakthroughs, let AI understand and generate language.

Many industry experts anticipate that technology is heading toward combining machine learning for prediction with LLM for natural communication. This means that the AI tools are best at narrow, practical tasks, like finding patterns in data and making predictions. These tools don’t replace people, but they can help them make decisions easier, faster, and more accurately. In other words, AI is a co-pilot, not a replacement.

Introducing EMA: Ecotrak Machine learning and Artificial intelligence

AI for business is here right now, not 5 years from now. As a leading Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), Ecotrak is developing AI-powered features that will be released into the platform starting now and into 2026.

Meet Ecotrak’s new tool called EMA, which stands for Ecotrak Machine learning and Artificial intelligence. Let’s look at the various ways EMA can empower facilities managers and service providers to be more effective in day-to-day decisions as well as long-term operations.

Customers: Streamline Operations with EMA

Failure Prediction:

• EMA can leverage historical data to help warn you before equipment breaks, so you can avoid unexpected downtime.

Service Cost Estimation:

• Know the estimated cost before you approve the work order, so no surprises later. EMA can help you understand if you’re paying the right amount for what's broken.

Interactive Troubleshooting:

• Leverage EMA’s chatbot to guide your team through quick checks for equipment issues. EMA combines information from manufacturers, the internet, photos and videos, and your facility teams’ troubleshooting steps. Increased troubleshooting efforts can help your team avoid unnecessary work orders.

Image Recognition:

• EMA can read equipment nameplates to learn information from an asset, cataloging manufacturer, model, and serial number, detecting warranties and equipment-specific details.

• EMA can also read proposals, receipts, and invoices, summarizing and creating data sets that can be referenced in the future.

Other Features:

• Fix or replace suggestions: EMA can act as a financial advisor, crunching the numbers to tell you if it's smarter to repair or replace an asset.

• Durability insights by brand or model: Power smarter equipment decisions with EMA calculating which brands and models have a longer useful lifecycle, based on real-world data.

• Budget prediction for maintenance and repair: EMA can create accurate CFO-style forecasting, helping you budget maintenance spend.

  Warranty optimization: Use EMA to flag equipment that is still under warranty so you don’t pay for covered repairs.

Providers: Leverage EMA for Better Business

Interactive Troubleshooting for Techs:

• When technicians are out in the field, EMA can act almost like a digital mentor, supporting interactive troubleshooting with resource data from multiple sources.

• EMA can suggest most likely fixes in real time, helping a technician solve problems faster and avoid costly callbacks.

Workload Predictions:

• EMA can help providers plan ahead with workload predictions, based on past data and predictive request tracking.

Performance Scoring:

• Facilities managers can use EMA to find providers, making decisions based on details like completion rates, response times, and customer ratings. Providers can earn priority placement with customers and win more business.

Autonomous Facilities Management Tools

AI can help you evolve your facilities management strategy from reactive to predictive, to eventually autonomous.

Reactive maintenance comes with hidden costs like supply chain delays, limited technician availability, vendor prioritization issues, operational downtime, and cost unpredictability.

Imagine: a system that not only tells you when a failure is likely going to happen, but also recommends the most cost-effective solution, schedules the right technician, and automatically uploads warranty coverage. With this kind of AI-powered facility system working quietly in the background 24-7, your facilities managers can focus their efforts on more complex issues and leveraging data in new ways.

Another scenario: you chat with EMA about an issue. She walks you through creating a service request, easily finding the asset details and incorporating historical performance information about how many times in the last year this asset has broken down. She filters through all of your company’s data, bringing back just what is relevant for your specific scenario, so that you can make the smartest decision possible.

Leveraging Ecotrak’s AI tools does require having the right data in your platform. If the data coming into your facilities management system is accurate, AI can help make sure the data going back to your users is as up-to-date and relevant as possible. And once your data is accurate, you can start using Ecotrak’s AI tools to drive real ROI, without overhauling existing systems. You can start small and get results quickly, and scale these AI-driven tools throughout the platform over time.

Launching EMA and AI Tools

If you are already an Ecotrak customer, we are launching two EMA licenses per customer account, included for free with your core subscription. This allows you to see what EMA is capable of doing in your day-to-day operations.

Future Ecotrak AI features, such as specific API or data integration, can be discussed with our customer success team. Your Customer Success Manager will be able to keep you up to date about upcoming webinars and product launches, including new features and hands-on training.

At Ecotrak, part of our mission has always been to help you refine your facilities data into actionable insights. As AI-powered tools continue to grow, adapt, and change, they will provide new and exciting ways to help move your business forward — and we are committed to being on the cutting edge of applying these AI opportunities to facilities management.