Facility management might not sound like the sexiest use of AI technology. But office space can be a huge expense for larger businesses -- the biggest after staff costs -- which is why Y Combinator-backed startup, VergeSense, says it's settled on facility management as the initial target for an AI-powered sensing device it's been developing since joining the incubator program in May. Their "sensor as a system" platform, as they dub it, consists of sensing devices containing a series of different sensor hardware, including an image sensor, coupled with a cloud platform for pre-training machine learning models that run on the hardware, process data and report occupancy analysis back to VergeSense's cloud. "We're using really inexpensive hardware… we've crammed a bunch of different sensors inside. The core of the product is actually built around computer vision, so we've got a really inexpensive image sensor that's embedded inside," VergeSense co-founder Dan Ryan tells TechCrunch.