The Occupancy Gap Nobody in the Building Can Actually Explain

CBRE’s 2026 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights reports that global average office utilisation jumped to 53% in 2025 — its highest since early 2020, up from 38% in 2024 — but that the target rate for most organisations remains above 65%, leaving a persistent efficiency gap.

JLL’s 2026 Global Occupancy Planning Benchmark puts actual utilisation at 56% globally against a 74% target, and records the largest year-on-year shift in hybrid attendance patterns in three years: the share of employees coming in three to four days a week jumped 19 percentage points in a single year. Attendance is recovering. Utilisation is not keeping pace. The question property teams are now asking is not whether people are in the building — it is whether the spaces they are in are the right ones, configured correctly, and actually being used when booked.

The answer to that question is sitting in your installed base. In the corner of almost every meeting room that contributed to those statistics sits an AV control panel, a camera, and a sensor array that already knows exactly why the booking-to-presence gap exists. That data is live, granular, and in most European enterprise deployments, nobody is doing anything commercial with it.

The gap between a room appearing booked and a room being used has three main drivers, and AV systems are positioned to diagnose all three. The first is ghost bookings: rooms reserved but never occupied because meetings moved to another space or were cancelled informally. A room sensor or camera-based occupancy detection picks this up immediately; a calendar system never does. The second is partial utilisation: rooms booked for twelve people, occupied by three. Camera-based headcount data tells that story in a way that door-badge readers cannot. The third is format mismatch: a room specified for video conferencing that gets used predominantly for internal huddles with no remote participants, meaning the codec, ceiling microphone array, and PTZ camera are generating no return on the capital invested in them.

The financial stakes are non-trivial. A mid-sized European enterprise with fifty meeting rooms, operating at 40% utilisation against a 65% target, is effectively paying for twenty rooms it does not need. At typical Central London or Frankfurt Grade A rates, that gap costs more annually than most AV service contracts by an order of magnitude. The property team already knows this. The question is whether they know you can help close it.

Property teams responding to this data typically reach for one of two levers: space reduction or space reconfiguration. Both are expensive and disruptive if based on bad assumptions. The value of accurate room-level utilisation data — data that distinguishes between a booking and a presence, between a video call and a local meeting, between a twelve-person room used at capacity and one used by two people for six months — is that it prevents expensive decisions made on incomplete evidence. Facilities directors who have been through one round of premature space consolidation driven by building-level badge data are now actively looking for better sources. The integrator who provides that source has a conversation that the property consultant cannot replicate.

Modern AV deployments generate several distinct data streams directly relevant to occupancy strategy, and most of them require no additional hardware investment from the client. Room control systems log power state, source selection, and session duration. This tells you when the room was actively in use versus passively booked. Camera systems with AI tracking log presence and headcount estimates, and on current-generation hardware, attention signals. Audio DSP platforms log microphone activation, call duration, and in some cases participant count via beam-forming metadata. Environmental sensors, now frequently bundled with room control packages, log CO₂ and motion, providing a secondary presence confirmation independent of AV activation.

The integration challenge is not sensor coverage; it is data aggregation. Most of these streams live in separate management silos: the room control platform, the camera management interface, and the UCC platform’s own analytics dashboard. Microsoft’s Teams Rooms Shared Spaces Insights tracks calendar reservations and call activity — but it cannot tell you what happened in the room outside a Teams session. Zoom’s equivalent reporting covers the call window only. Neither platform knows whether the room was occupied at 9 am before the 10 am booking, or whether the 10 am booking ran to eleven with no remote participants because the codec was never activated. That is the gap the integrator is uniquely placed to fill, because the integrator owns the relationship with every hardware layer in the room.

The aggregation problem is solvable without enterprise middleware. Several room control platforms now expose REST APIs that a competent integration engineer can query directly. A Python script running on a small on-premise device — or a cloud-hosted function on a monthly cost measured in single-digit euros — can pull session logs, presence events, and source activation data into a spreadsheet or a simple dashboard on a daily cycle. The infrastructure barrier is lower than most integrators assume.

The reason this opportunity is time-sensitive is that it is not going unnoticed. Integrated Workplace Management System providers and managed workplace services firms have been building occupancy analytics products for the past three years, and they are now actively pitching them to the same enterprise clients whose AV systems you installed. Their products are software-led and sensor-agnostic. They aggregate data from whatever sources exist in the building — badge readers, Wi-Fi association, building management systems, calendar APIs — and present it through a dashboard that facilities managers can use to drive space decisions. The pitch comes bundled with consultancy to interpret the data, which makes it compelling to a property team that does not have the internal resources to do the analysis itself.

The structural weakness in their offer is AV-layer granularity. An occupancy analytics platform that cannot distinguish between a room that was occupied and a room that had an active video session, or between a room where the display was on and one where it sat dark for forty minutes after the meeting started, is working with a materially incomplete picture. This is exactly the integration advantage that AVIXA research on AV-IT convergence has consistently identified: AV professionals hold a structural advantage over IT generalists at the hardware-to-data layer, and that advantage is most exploitable precisely when the IT generalist is trying to describe room-level behaviour without domain knowledge of what the AV system is doing.

The tell is in how IWMS vendors describe their own products. Phrases like "sensor-agnostic" and "hardware-independent" are engineering virtues repackaged as sales language — they mean the platform works around the absence of AV-layer data, not with it. When a facilities director asks why their occupancy dashboard shows a room as occupied but the display never came on, the IWMS vendor has no answer. You do.

The window for integrators to establish themselves as the authoritative data source for room-level occupancy analytics is somewhere between twelve and thirty-six months. After that, IWMS platforms will have built enough sensor-agnostic tooling that the AV-layer advantage diminishes and the conversation becomes a commodity data feed. The integrators who move now — who walk into the post-installation service conversation with a structured data offer rather than a break-fix contract — own the recurring revenue relationship. The ones who wait will be asked to provide a data stream to someone else’s dashboard.

The most common objection integrators raise about selling analytics services is that they are not a software company. This is true but irrelevant to most clients. The client does not want to buy software; they want to buy an answer to the question “how is our space actually being used?” The integrator’s job is to own that answer, whether they build the presentation layer themselves, white-label an existing platform, or structure the data handoff to a facilities partner.

The practical entry point for most integrators is a utilisation report service: a monthly or quarterly summary of room-level data — peak usage periods, booking-to-presence ratios, technology activation rates — drawn from the management interfaces they already have access to under the service contract. This requires structuring a deliverable around data that is already being collected, not buying new tooling. An article by Craig Park, Director of Digital Experience Design, Clark & Enerse, entitled "Future-Proof Your Business Model: How AV Integrators Can Thrive in a Changing Market" covers exactly this shift from reactive support contracts to intelligence delivery — and the commercial logic for why clients retain integrators longer when the relationship extends beyond break-fix. 

The more defensible version involves API integration between the room control platform, the camera management system, and a lightweight reporting layer. Several room control platforms now publish open APIs specifically to enable this. The investment required is primarily in structuring the data pipeline and the client-facing report format, not in hardware or additional sensor deployment. The client’s investment is effectively zero in the short term because the sensors are already in the room.

What makes this commercially durable is that the data conversation naturally extends the client relationship beyond the installation lifecycle. A client receiving monthly utilisation intelligence from their integrator is in a continuous business conversation, not a transactional hardware one. When the estate strategy changes — when the property team decides to consolidate floors, reconfigure room types, or invest in a new collaboration platform — the integrator tracking utilisation data is the first call. The IWMS firm selling the occupancy dashboard is the second.

The integrators most at risk are not the ones who dismiss this opportunity — they are the ones who recognise it and wait for a better moment to act. Every renewal conversation that passes without an analytics offer is a data point the IWMS platform collects about your client instead of you. By the time the better moment arrives, the relationship will have been restructured around someone else's dashboard.

The CBRE and JLL data confirm that utilisation is improving — but the gap between bookings and actual room presence remains the central unsolved problem for European corporate estates. AV integrators already capture more room-level evidence relevant to that problem than any other party in the building. If you are not packaging that data as a service, you are generating intelligence for free while someone else charges for the analysis. Stop waiting for the IWMS platforms to define what the AV analytics offer looks like. Define it yourself, price it into your next renewal conversation, and present the utilisation report as a deliverable rather than a byproduct. The data is already there. The only question is whose name goes on the dashboard.

Data note: CBRE 38% figure is 2024 building-level utilisation (rose to 53% in 2025; target 65%+). JLL 56% actual vs 74% target globally; largest YoY shift refers to attendance patterns (+19pp employees attending 3–4 days/week), not a utilisation gap figure. Brief’s 38–40% / 60%+ meeting room framing not directly sourced in either report — article uses confirmed figures only.