Finding Our New Home, The AI Way

At 28East, we’re growing! Our team and our business are expanding, and it’s a good problem to have. But with growth comes new challenges, and for us, that challenge was finding the perfect new office space.

We knew it wouldn’t be as simple as just picking a building. The ideal location had to meet the needs of the entire team. Our goal was to find a spot that would make everyone's daily commute easier and provide a great environment for work and life.

Our Search Criteria

To find the right spot, we first had to define what "perfect" meant to us. We identified a few key factors and assigned a score to each, ranking them by importance.

• Commute Time: This was our top priority. The best location is the one that minimises travel time and distance for everyone on the team. To figure this out, we gathered the home addresses of all our team members and focused on minimising the collective travel burden.

• Essential Amenities: We also considered the surrounding area. After all, a great office is more than just four walls. We wanted to be near places that make life more convenient and enjoyable. We specifically looked for:

  • Coffee Shops & Restaurants: A developer’s fuel is good coffee. We specifically searched for options with ratings above 4.5.

  • Grocery Stores: Proximity to our preferred stores.

  • Health & Wellness: We also looked for nearby gyms and parks, as a healthy team is a happy team.

With our criteria set, we had a short list of five promising office park locations. Now came the hard part: processing all that data.

The AI-Powered Solution

Instead of manually crunching the numbers and mapping out every single data point, we decided to put the latest technology to the test. We prompted Google’s Gemini AI with our challenge, providing it with our criteria and our list of potential office locations.

Gemini suggested a powerful combination of Google’s geospatial APIs: the Google Maps Compute Routes API and the Places Aggregate API. With our relevant API keys, Gemini went to work.

The result was a comprehensive analysis that took all our preferences and weighted scores into account. It calculated the optimal travel times and distances for our team and then aggregated the data on nearby amenities for each location.

And voilà! Gemini provided a clear, data-driven recommendation.

A New Way to Solve Old Problems

This project was a fantastic example of how combining Google Gemini AI and geospatial APIs can solve real-life business problems. It turned a complex, time-consuming decision into an efficient and objective process, all powered by data.

Just think about how this same approach could be used for other location-related challenges in your business—from optimising your supply chain to finding the ideal spot for a new retail store. The possibilities are endless.