What does governance really mean for smarter buildings? It’s a question that might not sound thrilling at first, but these are important conversations our industry.
In our first March session, the Monday Live! panel took on the tension between innovation and control. And with AI accelerating change at mind-bending speed, this isn’t just academic. It’s urgent.
The Collingridge Dilemma: Why Timing Matters
The problem, in a nutshell, has been with us long before the internet. When a technology is new, we don’t yet understand its impacts. We don’t know how to govern it because we lack information. But by the time the impacts become clear, years or decades later, the technology is so deeply embedded that changing it becomes nearly impossible.
That’s the Collingridge Dilemma. And historically, it’s played out over generations.
What’s different now? AI is compressing those timelines dramatically. What used to take decades might now happen in months or years. That changes everything about how we think about governance.
Open Ecosystems vs. Walled Gardens
One way technology gets “governed” is through walled gardens, companies controlling how their innovations are used. It’s a natural outcome: someone invents something new and wants to protect their advantage.
But here’s what’s interesting: after six years of Monday Live! conversations, we’re seeing a real shift. At the AHR Expo in Vegas, the major players were all promoting open approaches. Nobody was championing walled gardens anymore. That’s a significant change.
And honestly? No walled garden is safe from AI anyway. Eventually, AI will learn any proprietary protocol. The question isn’t whether openness wins, it’s how we structure that openness.
Where Governance Actually Matters
Here’s a critical distinction: governance isn’t about controlling every technical decision or dictating product features. It’s not about how a vendor builds their internal systems.
The real need for governance lives at the boundaries.
Where different systems meet. Where different vendors intersect. Where different domains, OT and IT, building systems and utility grids, have to work together. Where data flows from one party to another.
Those boundaries need precision. They need predictability. They need trust.
Real World Lessons
The PAE building in Portland offers a perfect example. The team couldn’t get grid signals from the utility, so they started sending signals to themselves. They’re specifying expectations for any vendor who wants to participate in their ecosystem. That’s governance as an enabler, not a restriction, a clear path forward that invites innovation rather than blocking it.
And then there’s the story about the customer whose IT department was so locked down and unreasonable that they simply unplugged the panels from the IT network and laid their own 5G infrastructure. When they couldn’t get metering data, they installed their own meter for free. The point? This stuff isn’t going to be stopped. The benefits are too huge.
The NIST Approach
The NIST cybersecurity framework offers a useful model. It doesn’t tell you exactly how to do things. Instead, it asks essential questions: Do you know what your assets are? Do you have an incident management process? Do you have a recovery plan? These are governing principles, not technical mandates.
AI, Risk, and Self-Governance
We’re now processing trillions of AI tokens per day, 6 trillion by the end of 2025, with most of them free. That scale changes everything.
And there’s a powerful form of self-governance at work: survival. When an autonomous vehicle killed a pedestrian, the entire self-driving initiative ended. One death. The stakes are that high. Innovators who don’t govern themselves effectively simply go out of business. Darwinian governance, if you will.
The Construction Industry Challenge
Our industry has centuries-old governance structures, building codes, ASHRAE standards, and consulting engineer specifications. But those structures have failed building automation again and again. The construction industry’s governance wasn’t designed for complex systems integration. Now we’re adding AI to something that’s already broken.
What’s Next
As AI accelerates change, governance becomes less about restriction and more about precision, especially at the boundaries between systems and organizations. It’s not about governing everything. It’s about governing the right things in the right way.
And the choice isn’t between governance and anarchy. It’s between open governance and being governed by someone else, whether that’s a walled garden or big government. For most of us, open governance is the clear winner.
Next Monday, the panel will dig deeper into a specific governance principle and explore how it could be defined to enable rather than restrict. Because if we get this right, governance isn’t a drag on innovation; it’s what makes innovation possible at scale.
Catch Monday Live! Every week at mondaylive.org. All views expressed are personal, not representative of any company or organization.
