Future-Proof Workplaces with Alex & Luke from XY Sense

In 2016, Melbourne-based entrepreneurs, Alex Birch, and Luke Murray decided to start a company to solve the problem of office space utilisation.

"We came to this realisation that large-enterprise organisations spend so much money on their space and it's very challenging for them to understand exactly how well this space is being used," says Alex.

This realisation led to the founding of XY Sense, a sensor and an artificial intelligence platform to monitor companies and their employees' workspace usage.

For these software engineer co-founders, building a hardware solution was a new experience and so was working with cutting-edge technologies, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

"We didn't build an algorithm and then choose how to apply it," says Alex.

"We said, here's the problem we need to solve. What's the best technology to do that and it just so happened that the best technology for this was deep learning and artificial intelligence."

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Episode interviews: XY co-founder and CEO Alex Birch, XY Sense co-founder and CTO Luke Murray, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker.

Future-Proof Workspaces with Alex & Luke

Key topics covered:

• Why a laser-focused mission wins
• How accurate data can unlock employee productivity and effectiveness
• XY Sense’s use of ML, AI and real-time data
• Alex and Luke's team-focused approach to company culture
• How XY Sense-enabled workspaces operate in a COVID-19 world

The best of Alex:

"Offices are used only about 60% of the time. So for a bank that could equate to around about a hundred million dollars spent on empty office space every year."

"We felt that there was a unique opportunity to build what we saw to be the Holy Grail for office space utilisation."

"Because XY Sense was in a very similar domain as the previous one, we were entrenched in the problem, and we understood it deeply, so that gave us a lot of credibility that we knew how to grow a company."

"Luke and I spent ten months building a prototype and bootstrapped it together. It was a Raspberry Pi prototype, but it was able to detect and understand where people were in the space anonymously."

"If you don't trust the data, then what good is analytics? For us to have trustworthy data, it has to be in real-time, so that if you walk around the room, you'll see the heat signature change in the floor plan."

"Our real-time data leads to all of our analytics. We have a 10,000-foot view of our analytics showing across the globe, how well different buildings are going."

"We can drill down to a country, to a building, to a floor, to a desk and see from a thousand-foot view or a 10,000-foot view right down into the detail."

"We can set an alarm for social distancing, so when there's someone who's in too close to another person, we can send a text message.

"Luke, my co-founder and I pride ourselves on our integrity. We want to be as honest and transparent as possible with