by Brianna Crandall — July 26, 2019 — Global professional services firm JLL recently introduced “JiLL,” an AI-powered, conversational smartphone app that can help employees streamline their work and be more productive. Users can use voice or text to converse with the virtual assistant application and simplify time-consuming daily tasks such as setting up meetings, locating colleagues, looking up lunch menus or shuttle schedules, filing service requests or finding a desk or conference room.
The AI-powered JiLL app offers plug-and-play connectivity across enterprise systems and apps such as calendars, room booking, service requests and facilities occupancy. Image courtesy JLL
While tens of millions of consumers benefit from smart speakers and smartphone assistants at home and on the go, this category of virtual enterprise assistants is largely missing in the workplace, notes JLL. With JiLL, enterprises can empower their workforces by providing everyone an enterprise admin in their pocket. Users can complete everyday office tasks the same way they use voice interfaces at home. Examples include: “Hey JiLL, book a weekly meeting with my team,” or “Hey JiLL, find me an open desk on the third floor this afternoon.”
Vinay Goel, chief digital product officer, JLL, remarked:
Consumers feel empowered in centrally managing their digital experiences at home and on the go. However, at work, simple tasks are siloed and can be frustrating. JiLL leverages JLL’s vast datasets about buildings, user interactions and transactions with physical spaces to provide a personalized and intelligent conversational interface that matches employees’ consumer experiences. Over time, we expect JiLL to become an essential platform for hundreds of skills that help employees improve their daily productivity.
JiLL is being piloted by clients this summer and will be generally available later this year to US customers.
Jim Pazzaglia, director of Global Business Services with P&G, which plans to pilot JiLL in the coming months, commented:
We understand that our success is linked to attracting and retaining talent, Providing digital technologies that reduce employee friction points and resemble the functionality our employees are accustomed to using outside of work helps grow our organizational productivity.
JiLL is the first product launched by JLL Labs, JLL’s in-house, global network of software engineers and product experts developing innovative and commercially strategic proptech products. JLL Labs complements the company’s investments in the broader proptech industry through the JLL Spark Global Venture Fund.
JiLL was developed in the JLL Labs Silicon Valley hub in Menlo Park, California. JiLL uses proprietary data and insights from JLL’s experience with clients and physical spaces, and combines them with Google Cloud Solutions technology including Google Cloud Platform, Dialogflow and Kubernetes containers.
Rob Enslin, president at Google Cloud, pointed out:
There is a tremendous appetite from the world’s enterprises to adopt AI capabilities in all parts of their businesses. It’s exciting to see businesses with rich histories like JLL developing new ways to bring AI to the market. We’re delighted that JLL has selected Google Cloud’s expertise and knowledge in AI to develop JiLL, and we look forward to partnering to drive digital transformation both within JLL and their expansive customer base.
Brian Kropp, group vice president, Gartner HR practice, noted:
Employees want their 9-5 to look like their 5-9. And their 5-9 lives are full of seamless, effortless experiences, largely enabled by digital technologies…Gartner research shows 67% of business leaders say [companies] will no longer be competitive if they don’t become significantly more digitalized by 2020. [Smarter with Gartner, Improve Employee Experience With Consumer-Centric HR, Jackie Wiles, October 29, 2018]
JLL’s Goel continued:
Companies will benefit from out-of-the-box plug-and-play connectivity across enterprise systems and apps like calendars, room booking systems, service request systems, and facilities occupancy sensors and utilization management systems. They can onboard users, specify organizational parameters and policies and be up-and-running quickly. As JiLL acquires new abilities, enterprises can automatically benefit. We expect to continuously add new skills to the app and open the platform to third-party capabilities as well.
For more information about the JiLL virtual assistant app, visit the JLL website. JLL is the brand name, and a registered trademark, of Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated. The Fortune 500 company has operations in over 80 countries and a global workforce of over 91,000.
