Over the last month, I’ve spent time with executive boards and growth leaders across multiple FM companies in the UK, APAC and India. Different organizations, different portfolios — but the same underlying concern.

Everyone is looking for assurance.
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Assurance that engineering teams are doing what is expected. Assurance that contractual commitments are being met. Assurance that operations haven’t drifted from what was promised during transition.

What stood out was this: the moment we connected maintenance activity with the context required for commercial and compliance teams, the impact was far greater than expected. It exposed how dependent every function is on the integrity of day-to-day maintenance — and how much margin leakage happens when that integrity slips.

This edition explores why the pathway from Autonomous Maintenance into Ops and Commercials is challenging, and why it is also the highest-ROI shift FM will make in the coming decade.

The Learning Moment

When we connected the maintenance workflow to contractual and compliance context, the result wasn’t incremental improvement — it was a revelation.
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Engineering, commercial, and compliance teams each assumed the others were aligned. In reality, they were dependent on people consistently doing the “right thing,” without a system capturing that behavior.

Over time, small deviations compound:

• Tasks get skipped or simplified.
• Documentation trails get thinner.
• Asset behaviours drift away from their performance baselines.
• Contract promises fade into operational habits.
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Across a multi-year contract, these deviations convert into real financial leakage — penalties, missed recoveries, avoidable callouts, unnecessary replacements. None of this shows up in traditional MIS reports because they don’t track the context behind decisions and interventions.

The surprising learning was not that gaps exist. It was how large they become when operations run without context continuity.

This is why the pathway from AM to Ops & Commercials matters more than ever.

The Evolution

The industry does not need to change how it frames maintenance. It needs to change what maintenance delivers.

For years, maintenance has been positioned as “fix what is broken” or “maintain to the schedule.” But what FM leaders truly want today is assurance — the confidence that the contract is being met, assets are behaving as expected, and the operation is not silently drifting.

In response, many organisations have tried to bridge the gap with technology experiments:

• isolated AI add-ons,
• internal IT tools,
• multiple point solutions,
• scattered analytics dashboards.

These efforts create activity, not assurance. It is noise without direction — an octopus rolling on a skateboard.

Autonomous Maintenance changes this because it builds context at every interaction. Not just fault data. Not just sensor readings. But the combined intelligence of:

• asset behaviour,
• technician observations,
• engineering interpretation,
• human judgement,
• commercial implications.

This context becomes the connective tissue between engineering, operations, and commercial teams. It is what turns maintenance from a task-based function into the foundation of operational assurance.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Assurance requires knowing:

• what happened,
• why it happened,
• how often it has happened,
• what was done last time,
• and what should happen next.
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Today, most operations don’t have this chain of reasoning. They have static tasks and templates that remain unchanged year after year.

This leads to predictable patterns:

• Over-maintenance on assets that don’t need it.
• Under-maintenance on assets with systemic issues.
• Repeated faults resolved with the same generic steps.
• No linkage between asset behaviour and PPM strategy.
• No closed loop between what commercial teams expect and what engineering teams actually execute.
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Autonomous Maintenance fills this gap by converting every interaction into a contextual narrative about the asset. That narrative is what commercial, compliance, and operations teams actually need — not another dashboard.

When context becomes continuous, assurance becomes attainable.

What We’re Learning

Healthcare offers a useful analogy.

As human beings evolve — age, history, patterns — diagnosis and treatment evolve alongside us. Baselines shift. Interventions get personalized. A framework exists, but every decision is contextualized.

Asset management has never adopted this adaptive model.

Most assets, especially non-connected ones, are treated as if they behave the same from year one to year ten. A technician’s interaction is often the only sensor available, yet that intelligence rarely compounds across the lifecycle.

This is why static checklists have become a limiting factor.

Dynamic maintenance checklists — evolving with asset condition, historical behaviors, and systemic patterns — introduce the adaptive intelligence that maintenance has been missing.

If an AHU repeatedly shows ventilation or fan imbalance, the annual maintenance plan must deepen into those areas. Tasks must adjust. Frequencies must adjust. Escalation pathways must adjust.
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Dynamism brings maintenance closer to how assets actually behave, and in doing so, it closes the loop between asset performance and contractual assurance. This is becoming a core pillar of Autonomous Maintenance.

The Path Forward

Autonomous Maintenance is no longer just a maintenance innovation. It is becoming the backbone of operational assurance.
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The pathway from AM → Ops → Commercials is challenging because it exposes invisible gaps that leaders didn’t realise were draining margins. But it is also the pathway that delivers the highest ROI — through clarity, predictability, and alignment.

As FM organizations absorb new levels of scrutiny across PPPs, BFIs, and long-term contracts, assurance will become the defining outcome of operations. Static frameworks won’t get us there. Adaptive, context-rich operating models will. And Autonomous Maintenance is emerging as the only viable foundation for that evolution.

P.S - It was in Chapter 8, we had spoken about integrated assurance for the first time and we were not sure of the pathway forward! This chapter and our experiences have certainly taken us forward in our quest. You can explore chapter 8 here- https://www.xempla.ai/autonomous-maintenance-chronicles/from-autonomous-actions-to-autonomous-operations-centers-the-learning-journey