At AHR in Las Vegas, the LonMark with C4SB booth theme was “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” It felt appropriate. Interoperability is not magic; it’s a series of bridges, from models to meaning, from intent to lifecycle, from handover to operations, and ultimately to scale.
Our industry often hides behind complexity, layered diagrams, overlapping standards, jargon, and proprietary abstractions. But when you strip away the noise, the core idea is simple: systems must connect, and those connections must preserve meaning.
I’ve been working in and around standards and silo-busting efforts in the AEC industry for more than 30 years. I’ve seen ambitious digital transformation waves, interoperability promises, and incremental progress.
I’ve never seen a convergence like this.
We’ve never seen a force like AI moving at this speed. Some estimate capability growth at 10X per year, pushing beyond what Moore’s Law ever described. Whether that exact number holds is less important than what it signals: the pace and the pressure have changed.
None of this is new in principle. Owners have needed lifecycle continuity for decades. Engineers need equipment identity that survives handover instead of being recreated from scratch. Operators need a structured context. What’s new is the compression of time. AI has removed the illusion that fragmentation can continue without consequence.
It is no longer useful to debate whether transformation is happening. It is happening. The real question is whether legacy proprietary platforms, long-established standards bodies, and new entrants alike are willing to adapt fast enough to participate.
The Center of the Universe is Lonely
For decades, standards organizations, buildingSMART, NIBS Digital Twin Committee, OGC, ASHRAE, NIST, and others have done critical work. I remain actively involved in many of them.
But there has always been a pattern: each standard becomes a center of gravity. The assumption is that everything else should align with it.
That model no longer scales.
Buildings sit at the intersection of BIM, GIS, automation, asset management, finance, cybersecurity, grid interaction, and AI.
No single standard can occupy the center of that universe. What’s changing is not that one standard has won; it’s that the idea of a single center has lost relevance. Multiple standards can now coexist and connect through shared ontologies and graph-based models.
Bridging Instead of Replacing
The Coalition for Smarter Buildings (C4SB) is one of the first serious attempts I’ve seen to operationalize that bridging in real time.
Its objective is not to replace or centralize standards, but to connect them, making decades of work immediately useful rather than isolated.
The Second shift is Tempo
AI does not wait for perfect standards. It requires structured, accessible data. The bottleneck today is not technical feasibility. It is cultural and governance inertia.
Silos are not just technical artifacts. They are habits, and habits scale confusion, whether in human workflows or AI systems.
The Linux Foundation operates on what it calls a “do-ocracy”, influence flows to those who build, test, and implement. That cultural shift is as important as the technical one. The built environment cannot afford another decade of theoretical alignment. It needs executable alignment.
What I am seeing through the Coalition’s work is an effort to decompose those silos and recombine them into an executable stack.
The Coalition as Execution Layer
Operating within the Linux Foundation ecosystem, an organization that has already transformed global infrastructure through open collaboration, the Coalition applies an iterative, implementation-first model to the built environment.
This is not a finished product. It is a system in motion.
The Coalition: Rewiring the Built Environment in Real Time
Below is a cross-section of active working groups, not slides about interoperability, but operational layers of a connected stack:
- Ecosystem leadership
- Protocol evolution
- Semantic structure
- Building identity
- Lifecycle infrastructure
- Open connectivity
- Scalable deployment
- Financial translation
- Executive governance
Together, they form something larger than any single standard.
The work is underway. The value is tangible. And it is evolving quickly.
These short clips were recorded in person at AHR Expo in Las Vegas. We stepped away from panels and presentations and captured focused conversations about what is actually being built and implemented. They are brief by design, snapshots of a system forming in real time.
1. Coalition Leadership: Why This Moment Is Different
This is not another committee.
Rick Justis explains why the Coalition exists now, not five years from now. This is not another committee; it’s an execution layer connecting standards before AI-driven acceleration leaves fragmentation behind.
2. Protocol Evolution: BACnet Meets the Cloud
Thirty years of dominance, now what?
BACnet built the foundation of modern building automation. Now it must evolve at cloud speed. This session with James Lee & Andy McMillan explores how BACnet and cloud-native approaches converge rather than compete.
3. Semantic Structure: ASHRAE 223P and Meaningful Systems
If a building can’t describe itself, AI can’t optimize it.
The Semantic Buildings Working Group lead by Parastoo Delgoshaei of NIST, aligns BIM and ASHRAE 223P into a machine-readable structure. Structure comes before intelligence.
4. Building Identity: The Digital Building Profile
Before AI can optimize a building, the building must describe itself.
David Holmberg (NIST) introduces the Digital Building Profile shifts from static files to self-describing, queryable systems.
5. Lifecycle Infrastructure: cloudBIM in Action
From BIM file to live operational infrastructure.
Kimon Onuma describes CloudBIM that turns a BIM file into lifecycle infrastructure. Persistent IDs connect geometry, graphs, and live data, grounding AI in context rather than guesswork.
6. Connectivity Layer: IBB and the Open Building Stack
This is how the data actually moves.
Standards define structure. CloudBIM provides context. Tristan de Frondeville describes how the IBB and Open Building Stack move the data in real time through open connectivity.
7. Scalable Deployment: LonMark and the 70%
The industry has ignored 70% of its buildings.
Most buildings are small. Scale requires repeatability, not custom integration. Tracy Markie talks about repeatability over snowflakes. LonMark addresses the 70% the industry often ignores.
8. Financial Translation: TXO and Executive Clarity
If you can’t prove value, you won’t survive.
Interoperability must translate into economics. Pete Scanlon shows how Total Cost of Everything (TXO) connects technical ambition to boardroom accountability.
9. Governance Layer: Asset Leadership Network
Smart assets without leadership are just noise.
Connectivity without governance creates noise. Michael Bordenaro describes how the Asset Leadership Network ensures executive oversight evolves alongside technical capability.
The work is underway. The value is tangible. It will not wait. This ecosystem will continue to evolve. The only question is who chooses to evolve with it.
AHR Series: Four Conversations, One Direction
At AHR in Las Vegas, the conversation moved from theory to execution. These four pieces trace that shift, from platform tension to real-world proof to a coalition building the bridges at scale.
Part 1-When Platforms Stop Fighting and Start Connecting
From platform wars to platform peace, why interoperability requires alignment, not dominance.
Read here.
Part 2-From Models to Meaning: Bridging the PAE Living Building
The PAE Living Building as proof that BIM, semantics, and operations can stay connected.
Read here.
Part 3-A Coalition in Motion: Building the Bridges at Machine Speed
Standards, code, and leadership converging at machine speed.
Read here.
Part 4 – The Proof is in the Ice Cream
From live sensor data to operational action in days, proving complexity is a choice, not a constraint.
Read here.
