New Delhi: AI is getting deeply integrated into our daily lives in ways that are benefitting humans across a wide variety of domains, including agricultural robots, marine conservation drones, predictive maintenance for infrastructure, psychotherapy companions and virtual chemistry for drug discovery. If those who are manage housing societies are wondering how AI can make their lives, and the lives of residents easier, then Adda.io has AI infused technology solutions for you. Adda offers an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite for residential communities, along with a Gatekeeper App for managing visits and a Books app for keeping track of accounts.
We spoke to Krishanu Mukherjee, AVP of Growth at Adda.io to better understand how housing societies can use AI, “Today the best of breed housing society software are using AI to provide convenience to residents and also help in automating various manual processes for the committee members and community management staff. In ADDA, we have embedded AI in the Community Helpdesk, so that residents can reach out to community staff in any language, with the AI translating it to English. In our incubation centers we are working on multiple other AI enabled features like AI enabled vendor Invoice. This feature would be a huge time saver for Community Accountants, instantly reading details from vendor invoices to help create automatic accounting entries in Adda.”
AI can boost security for housing societies
AI allows for sophisticated object tracking that can automatically flag suspicious behaviour in any of the CCTV cameras used across a complex, which can be taxing for security personnel to monitor continuously. AI powered security cameras can also offer privacy in areas that demand it. Mukherjee says, “In Communities, hundreds of hours of CCTV video is recorded. AI systems which are trained for detecting anomalies, suspicious or unnatural movements or behavior can automatically raise alarms. These have multiple uses – for example, detection of movement near the boundary of a community at night can indicate a burglary attempt and send alarm to security. These systems can be potential life savers too. For example – in the context of Swimming pool safety, whether CCTV cameras should be used or not is often debated, as the question of privacy comes into the picture. Here, an AI camera can be used, which does not make the video available to anyone to view, but silently keeps analyzing the footage, to identify any danger to swimming pool users, and raise alarm if any such incident occurs.”
AI systems work well with IoT
Housing societies are increasingly adopting to IoT devices for managing communities, for lighting and energy management, tracking water levels in tanks, automating the management of parking spaces, tracking visitors, and monitoring air quality. Mukherjee explains how AI can integrate well with such existing or planned systems, “Communities often use IoT devices like face recognition cameras for capturing attendance of staff, or even as access control devices for clubhouses, etc. Other devices like automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) are used at gates for providing easy access to vehicles. AI cameras when used for these purposes can learn and self-improve their accuracy. Housing societies usually monitor the health of infrastructure through manual PPM processes. IoT devices can be used here – example – for automatic monitoring of diesel level in DGs, etc. Some communities have started using such IoT devices to monitor assets/infrastructure which are difficult to reach or are hazardous in nature. All these devices when coupled with AI can gather data, learn and become more effective at predicting incidents, etc.”
Adda.io on data use
Privacy is bound to be among the top priorities of housing society managers, which is why our final question to Mukherjee was on how Adda.io collects and uses data. Mukherjee responded, “AI works on data. Today most communities are adopting best of breed software like Adda.io which is helping to bring processes online. Thus, a huge amount of data is getting available to be analysed by AI. Data from disparate systems are also, at times, being brought into one system like Adda.io, through integrations – on which AI can work wonders and give various immersive insights – trends in maintenance collection, infrastructure issue predictions and much more! Not only for Individual Communities, even for developers this data can create wonders. One such marvel is Adda’s Central Command Center, which brings in data from not only multiple properties but multiple systems into one dashboard – mining thousands of data points to highlight action areas for Community Managers. Communities using Ad platform software, in the disguise of society management apps, are unable to bring community processes online, creating data gaps. Realizing this, hundreds of Communities are migrating to Adda.io in 2024.”
