Don’t get me wrong I would love to spend the time to build a system like that, as an engineer it sound fun!
No doubt this project came at the cost of someone paying the company for value that was not transferred
Sorry for being Daniel Downer here…
We implement “15% time” for this and other reasons (and we certainly didn’t invent the idea). Some great ideas came out of it that grew into products and features. But mostly it’s stuff that was fun or interesting but didn’t directly lead to any revenue. That’s not just ok- it’s an important part of getting better as an engineer.
As a rule, every client contributes with something. Probably not at the same rate.
All those tasks are "home automation" for the office. You can buy solutions for this, e.g. meeting room free/busy, but inherently there's a large amount of customisation and the COTS ones tend to be surprisingly expensive.