Latest Monday Live session. For those who couldn’t attend, here are the critical takeaways from our discussion, which covered both a review of AHR Expo and the accelerating impact of AI on our industry.
AHR Expo 2024: A Consensus for Openness and Interoperability
The energy in Las Vegas was unmistakable. The industry is reaching a significant inflection point, marked by a collective push toward collaboration and open standards.
- A Unified Direction: A major theme was the move away from proprietary “walled gardens.” Sessions like “Platform Wars and Peace” highlighted a growing consensus around open, interoperable solutions, with key industry players acknowledging shared futures built on common frameworks.
- Critical Mass for Collaboration: Groups like Coalistion for Smarter Buildings (C4SB) reported strong engagement, with their working groups being recognized as essential for tackling industry-wide challenges in cybersecurity, cloud integration, and data semantics. The presence of multiple organizations in shared booths underscored a commitment to common goals.
- Change is Here: The sentiment was clear: the pace of change is accelerating. The long-held idea that transformation takes decades is being challenged. The focus is now on actionable progress—getting to the data and leveraging it now.
The AI Imperative: Not a Distant Future, but a Present Reality
Our conversation then turned to Artificial Intelligence, with a sobering look at its exponential growth and immediate implications
- Exponential, Not Linear: Current advances in AI capabilities are estimated to improve at a rate of 10x per year. This is a pace that dwarfs historical models like Moore’s Law, suggesting a transformative impact within years, not decades.
- From Co-pilot to Replacement: The evolution is moving from AI as an assistive tool (“co-pilot”) to Agentic AI—autonomous systems capable of executing complex tasks and making decisions. This shifts the economic equation and has already begun disrupting major software business models.
- Implications for Buildings: The technology driving autonomous vehicles and AI agents is directly applicable to building systems. The question is no longer if AI will autonomously manage buildings, but how quickly and effectively the industry will adapt. The value of instant, data-driven optimization is becoming impossible to ignore.
The Path Forward: Communicate, Collaborate, and Engage
The conclusion from both fronts is the same: passivity is not an option.
- Sustain the Momentum: The dialogue started at AHR must continue. We must actively share knowledge and push for the interoperable frameworks that will allow good, transparent AI to flourish in our domain.
- Develop Good AI: As an industry, we have a responsibility to advocate for AI systems built on open data and standards. Our domain stands to benefit enormously from AI done right, but could be hampered by closed, proprietary approaches.
- Embrace Critical Thinking: In an age of AI, the human capacity for critical thought, creativity, and oversight becomes more vital than ever. Technology is a tool, and its value is determined by the wisdom of its application.
The future of commercial buildings is being written now, at the intersection of practical collaboration and technological transformation. Let’s continue to build it together.
You can find the full session recording and slides on our homepage.
The Platform Wars are over. If you’re still fighting for the “Center of the Universe,” you’ve already lost.
I just returned from hashtag#AHR2026 & ASHRAE in Vegas with this: The technology is here. The owners are demanding it. And AI isn’t asking nicely anymore, it’s demanding it.
Our industry has been building “Digital Museums”, models and dashboards that look beautiful but are trapped in proprietary silos. We take engineering intelligence and “flatten” it into dumb PDFs and spreadsheets where data goes to die.
When I was asked to join the “Platform Wars” panel, I made a decision. I wasn’t going there to fight a war. I went to draft a Peace Treaty.
We don’t need one app to rule them all. We have already built the solution: The C4SB – Coalition for Smarter Buildings
