Artificial intelligence has become a universal marketing claim. Waitack made a different choice — of words, and of method: Augmented Intelligence. Behind the term lies a simple conviction: AI is only worth as much as the expertise it serves.
AI alone does not design good workspaces
An algorithm knows how to optimise a function. What it does not know, on its own, is what makes a good working day, what a corporate real estate team expects from a site consolidation, or why poorly planned circulation sinks a fit-out that looked profitable on paper.
Workplace planning is a hybrid problem. It is combinatorial — thousands of possible configurations on a single floor plate — but also human, regulatory and strategic. Solve it with computing power alone and you get layouts that look impressive and cannot be built. Solve it with expertise alone and you get sound decisions that are slow, and impossible to roll out across an entire portfolio.
Augmented Intelligence means refusing to choose: putting the machine in the service of expertise, not the other way around.
A team in equal parts
Waitack is, quite literally, built 50 / 50.
On one side, mathematicians and engineers: they design the models, train the algorithms and let the platform generate an optimised layout in seconds.
On the other, architects, programmers, sociologists and workplace planning experts: they bring field knowledge — real-world usage, regulatory constraints, the ratios that make a space work or fail.
These two worlds do not operate in silos. For eight years they have collaborated daily, on the same problem, within the same team. Science feeds the expertise; the expertise corrects and steers the science. That constant, productive friction sits at the centre of Waitack's research — carried out at the intersection of AI and sociology.
What it changes for the decision
This alliance shows up in the product. Because the algorithms are designed with practitioners, the scenarios generated factor in real-world constraints from the very first second. Because the expertise is equipped with science, those scenarios are produced in seconds and scale from a single floor to a building, or an entire portfolio.
For a real estate or workplace director, the point is not to add one more AI to the toolkit. It is to gain an intelligence that speeds up the trade-off without over-simplifying it, and that leaves the final decision to the project teams. AI alone impresses; expertise alone reassures. It is the combination that makes it possible to decide better, and faster.