JLL Bets on JiLL, Its New Digital Assistant That Plans Team Meetings

Move over Alexa, JiLL is here.

That's what JLL, formerly known as Jones Lang LaSalle, is hoping more office workers will be saying by next year. The real estate services company has created its own version of Amazon’s virtual assistant using Google technology to help employees navigate work-related tasks and queries in much the same way they do in their homes and on the go.

The Chicago-based commercial real estate services firm is getting a jump on the rapid move to bring the effortlessness that voice- or text-activated intelligent conversation assistance is supposed to provide to the office environment. Gartner, the global research firm, predicts that a quarter of digital workers will be using virtual assistants in the workplace by 2021 – yes, in two-plus years.

“Employees want their 9-to-5 to look like their 5-to-9,” Brian Kropp, a Gartner group vice president, said in a statement. “And their 5-to-9 lives are full of seamless, effortless experiences, largely enabled by digital technologies.”

Some 67% of business leaders don’t believe they can compete “if they don’t become significantly more digitalized by 2020,” he added.

JLL Labs created the smartphone app aimed initially at simplifying the mundane and often time-consuming tasks of setting up meetings, finding desk space or locating colleagues.

A quick, “Hey JiLL, please find me an open desk on the third floor this afternoon,” is designed to shave precious minutes off employees’ most routine tasks and “reduce employee friction points and resemble the functionality our employees are accustomed to using outside of work,” the company said.

JiLL will leverage the firm’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,” Vinay Goel, chief digital product officer at JLL, said in a statement.

“Over time, we expect JiLL to become an essential platform for hundreds of skills that help employees improve their daily productivity,” he added.

JLL developed the product combining its own proprietary data and insight with Google Cloud Solutions technology. JLL is testing the app internally in Chicago and in JLL Labs' Menlo Park, California, offices with expectations for a full rollout later this year.

The company didn’t say whether JLL’s chief marketing officer for the Americas, Jill Kouri, had any connection in the naming of JiLL.

Like Alexa, Goel expects JiLL to become more intuitive with more use and as JiLL acquires new skills and third-party capabilities are added.