A few weeks before Tech for Retail, the European retail show taking place on 30 November and 1 December 2026 at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, we spoke to Rui Santos Couto, CMO at Infraspeak. His book Becoming a Strategic Facilities Manager has just been published in French. In it, he makes a simple case: managed well, multi-site retail facilities have a direct impact on margin, customer experience and brand image. AI can help get there faster, as long as it leads to better decisions.
Why is store maintenance still seen as a cost centre?
Rui Santos Couto: Because people only notice it when it fails. Nobody in the boardroom congratulates the team because the cold rooms in all 200 stores made it through the summer. So the budget lands on the table as a line to cut.
In the book, I use the image of the FM Iceberg: 20% of what FM does is visible, 80% stays below the surface. Compliance, the real condition of assets, supplier performance, risks piling up… Until that submerged part is measured, leadership only sees the bill.
Takeaway: what leadership can't see, it ends up cutting.
In practice, what does facility management change for a retail brand?
R. S. C.: Everything the customer experiences in store goes through it. A cold room that gives up on a Saturday morning means stock in the bin and an empty aisle. A shutter stuck at opening time means a morning of lost sales. Air conditioning down in the middle of the sales means customers leave sooner (and say so on Google).
For a multi-site brand, brand image is at stake too. Customers don’t average out your stores. They judge the brand on the one they walked into, including the day the toilets are out of order.
And complexity grows with the network. Two hundred stores often means two hundred ways of reporting a fault: a phone call, an email, a WhatsApp to the technician everyone knows. The result: nobody at head office knows how much a store costs to maintain, or why some cost twice as much as others.
Takeaway: in retail, maintenance shows up in store revenue long before it shows up in the P&L.
What does FM need to earn a seat at the executive table?
R. S. C.: It needs to speak the language of the people sitting there. A CFO doesn’t react to the number of jobs completed. They react to OPEX, CAPEX, an asset’s total cost of ownership, quantified risk.
Take a common decision: refurbishing a store concept, or replacing a fleet of refrigerated cabinets. Made without the maintenance history, it can leave the brand paying for years for choices a simple repair-or-replace analysis would have avoided. Leadership often realises FM should have been in the room only after paying for its absence.
The book offers frameworks to build the business case, using data the maintenance team already has, just rarely in a form leadership can read.
Takeaway: FM earns its seat at the table the day it walks in with numbers leadership understands.
