The Facility Manager's AI Playbook
30 copy-and-paste prompts for the reading, writing, and deciding you keep taking home. Plus the one thing nobody selling you AI will say.
30 prompts · No software required · Field tested · Shawn Black, CRFP
This is not a software pitch.
Everything in this playbook came out of running a facility management company and installing AI systems inside trades and services operations. Work order triage, quoting, vendor follow up. Not out of a conference keynote.
You will not find a vendor comparison, a sensor roadmap, or a prediction about 2030. You will find a hard opinion about why most AI in facility management fails, a four question filter for deciding what to automate, and 30 prompts you can run this afternoon with a tool you already have.
Copy the prompt. Replace what is in brackets. Paste in your real notes. That is the entire instruction manual.
What is inside
The argument
Why AI makes bad operations worse, and what to fix before you automate anything.
The filter
Four questions to answer before you hand a task to a machine.
The library
30 copy-and-paste prompts across work orders, vendors, budgets, compliance, communication, and your own time.
The guardrails
What never gets pasted into a public tool, plus a five day start you can run next week.
AI will not fix broken operations. It will run them faster.
AI does not have judgment. It has fluency. On a screen those look identical, and they are not the same thing.
30 prompts. Six parts of the job.
Every prompt produces a draft, not an answer. You stay in the loop on all thirty. That is not a limitation, that is the design.
Work Orders and Reactive Maintenance
Prompts 01 – 05Vendors, Bids, and Contracts
Prompts 06 – 10Budgets, Capital, and Justification
Prompts 11 – 15Inspections, Compliance, and Safety
Prompts 16 – 20Tenant, Client, and Executive Comms
Prompts 21 – 25Your Team and Your Own Time
Prompts 26 – 30Write the rule down before your team writes a prompt.
Decide in writing what never gets pasted into a public tool. Compliance and code prompts produce a starting point, not an authority. Verify every requirement against the code of record and the authority having jurisdiction before you act. The teams that get burned are not the ones who moved too fast. They are the ones who never wrote the rule down.
Take the playbook with you.
Download the full PDF, or talk to our team about putting these systems to work across your sites.