This post is based on the Monday Live discussion from June 1, 2026. Monday Live is a weekly web series that explores the future of smarter buildings. Hosted by industry veterans and open to all, the conversations air every Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern. Archives and profiles are available at mondaylive.org. The following summary reflects the discussion as observed.
We are starting a new theme for June. The theme is readiness. How ready are we to take this industry into its next chapter?
The answer is complicated. But one building in Portland, the PAE Living Building, is showing us what readiness actually looks like.
What Basic Readiness Means for a Building
When you talk about buildings and assets, you need to know four simple things about every piece of equipment:
Where is it?
What is it called?
What does it do?
What is it connected to?
Why is it even there?
That last question matters most. A pump in a hospital has a different mission than a pump in an office building. The same asset has completely different needs depending on where it is and what it is doing.
The Missing Piece: A Building Registry
The building industry lacks something fundamental. We have phone number registries so nobody gets duplicate numbers. We have domain registries for the web. But there is no standard building registry.
Some owners have built their own. The California Community Colleges maintain a registry of their owned buildings, hosted on their server and accessible via an API. When a room number changes or a building name changes, the system knows. If you rely on PDFs or Excel files, that information goes out of sync immediately. Imagine managing phone numbers with the Yellow Pages. That is where the building industry still lives.
Real Time Expectations
We are all used to using Uber. We do not print a PDF of available rides. We do not share Excel files. We open an app, log in, and get a ride in real time. The interface is simple. It requires almost no training.
The building industry is not there yet. But that is exactly where it needs to go.
The PAE Living Building has 3,000 assets being tracked. It has 127,000 RDF triplets describing relationships between those assets. But the technology details are not the point. The point is that a person walking through the building can capture information with their phone, feed it through a simple AI tool, and have those assets automatically added to the building registry.
One Building, One Room, One Battery
Here is a concrete example. The PAE building has a battery room with eight battery panels. As of last week, those panels were not fully associated with the digital model. Someone walked the building with an expert, recorded audio of the tour, photographed labels, and then created QR codes.
Now scan that QR code. It takes you directly to that room, to that specific battery. You type in your name, submit a work order, and you are done. You do not need to know anything about BIM, RDF, or data models. You just need to be in the room and notice something wrong.
Different Users, Same Real-Time Data
The person in the room sees a simple form. The technician sees something completely different. The technician gets an email with the request. They can search for the component, see its attributes, look up warranty information, and check how it connects to other systems.
This only works because the data is live. If that pump was moved this morning or a new one was installed an hour ago, the technician needs to know that. There are real-world examples of maintenance crews removing the wrong air handling unit because their paper documents were out of date.
File Exchange Versus Live Access
The building industry is comfortable with files. Revit files, IFC files, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets. These are fine for coordination between design teams. But they are not fine for live operations.
The Revit model of the PAE building is 330 megabytes. The IFC file is 990 megabytes. The RDF file, which strips away geometry and keeps only the relationships and meaning, is 18 megabytes. That is still a file.
Live access is different. You do not call an Uber with a PDF. You call it with a mobile device connected to live APIs. The building industry needs the same thing. A live API connection to a registry that knows where everything is and how everything connects.
Spreadsheets and APIs Can Coexist
Not everyone wants to use a mobile phone. Some technicians prefer spreadsheets. That is fine. You can export the registry to Excel. A technician can take that spreadsheet offline, add three new pieces of equipment, and hand it back. As long as the IDs are consistent, the system absorbs the updates.
For more automated workflows, there is an API. A Google Sheet can read directly from the building registry API. If someone adds a new pump to the model, it appears in the spreadsheet immediately. No syncing. No manual updates.
AI Changes the Value Proposition
Here is what has fundamentally shifted. AI has changed why openness matters.
For years, manufacturers did not see the value in fully exposing their data through BACnet or Modbus. The value proposition fell short. But now the conversation is about AI readiness. If your equipment is not AI-ready, a system that is AI-ready will replace you.
The PAE building demonstrates this. You can ask questions in plain English:
What room is the battery storage in?
What is the total battery capacity of the building?
Graph the total building power use for the past seven days.
What time did the maximum export occur?
The AI answers. It pulls from documents, from live telemetry, from the RDF graph. It generates graphs. It schedules reports. No one has to go down to the basement, find the old computer, remember the login, and hunt through menus. You just ask.
What Is Still Hidden
Not everything in the PAE building is accessible. Some systems remain black boxes. The Lochinvar water heaters, ironically, are not connectable even though SkyCentrics came from a water heater background. The only way to see that data is to walk up to the unit and read the screen. Someone suggested pointing a camera at the display and making it live that way.
The point is that technology is not the blocker. The technology exists. The blocker is closed systems and owners who do not ask the right questions. If owners start demanding open access, vendors will respond. If they do not, competitors will replace them.
Triage: Start with What You Can Reach
A common mistake is waiting until everything is connected before doing anything. That leads to ten years of waiting and nothing to show for it.
Walk into a building. Find the most critical equipment. Get those assets connected. Point a camera at the dark systems if you have to. Start somewhere. Otherwise the patient dies on the table.
The PAE building is not perfect. Not every asset is linked. But enough is linked to have a real conversation with the building. That is the difference between readiness and paralysis.
The Future Is Cloud Native and On-Premise
The building industry needs a cloud native computing infrastructure. That means on-premises solutions that are almost as powerful as the cloud. Docker containers. Kubernetes. An open ecosystem where different apps and different vendors can plug in without creating new silos.
The worst outcome would be to replace old silos with new ones. Some vendors will try to scramble the IDs, create random names, and force you to come back to them. That is not readiness. That is the same problem with new paint.
The goal is a shared registry with consistent IDs that anyone can use. An ecosystem, not a walled garden.
Getting Equipment Ready
We have spent a lot of time talking about getting people ready for AI. But we also need to focus on getting the equipment ready. If you cannot extract data from a system, that system is not AI-ready.
The message to vendors is simple. If you keep your data behind a proprietary gate, we are not buying your system. Get over it.
This happened before with BACnet. The old guard would not support open protocols, and new players came on the scene. Evolution happens. Sometimes the dinosaurs have to die.
The technology is here. The examples exist. The only question is whether the industry is ready to demand live, open, AI-ready buildings. Not with PDFs. Not with Excel files. With live APIs and registries that work like everything else in the modern world.
The future of building automation is simpler, more connected, and more secure. The PAE Living Building shows what that future looks like today.
Monday Live is a weekly web series exploring the future of smarter buildings, hosted every Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern. Learn more at mondaylive.org.
The Coalition for Smarter Buildings (C4SB) is a Linux Foundation project advancing open, cloud native infrastructure for the built environment. Visit c4sb.org.
Further Reading
https://www.c4sb.org/projechttps://github.com/C4SBF
