Looking Ahead: Leveraging Facility Data for Smart Building Success in the New Year

Moderator  00:44

Hi everybody. Thank you so much for joining us with if Miss webinars today, we are looking ahead, leveraging facility data for smart building success in the new year. Now this webinar is going to delve into key insights from a recent study commissioned by Johnson Controls and conducted by Forrester Consulting, which surveyed leaders in smart buildings. So at the beginning, we have some housekeeping. Let us know where you’re joining us from. I’m Kim Jackson with IFMA, and I’m joining you from Houston, Texas. And also, while you’re chatting in there, if you have any specific questions, please share that the panelists will be answering the relevant questions throughout the webinar, and then, of course, at the end as well. Now it’s going to give me great pleasure to introduce Eddie Wagoner, our moderator for today’s webinar. He serves as a tech evangelist, if you will, for the industry, challenging and inspiring thinking on the intersection of the digital and physical workplace. When we asked Eddie for a fun fact for his introduction, he said, I’m an accountant with a CPA who spent the last couple of decades working in technology, and people don’t think of us as fun. So Eddie got his start in facilities management at the age of 12, when he convinced his father and the owner of a small facilities management business to give him an after school job cleaning toilets. In fact, 120 plus daily. Oddly, he loved it, and without planning it, every role since has involved real estate. So in terms of technology, he got his start, which some of you may identify with when a senior partner at one of the world’s largest accounting firms could not turn on his very first computer. Eddie flipped the switch, turning it on, and the partner created a new role for him in that office, called IT support. And this last bit fun fact of Eddie will lead you to understand his style, because he says every report card he ever received while praising his study habits and grades, criticized his constant talking in class. But he would like to point out that all of his former lover, his former teachers out there that his gift of gab worked out so teachers, he is now moderating webinars for global, globally recognized industry leaders like IFMA. So Eddie, if you would please join me so that you can come in and moderate, Hi,Eddie, Hi, Kim. I didn’t know you had all those details. I will tell you my sixth grade teacher still watches these things. She gets the the clips or the press, if you will. And that comment about talks too much, but I make money with my mouth now is specifically for her. Thank you to IFMA for asking me to moderate like Kim said. I got my start at 12 in facilities management, and have loved it ever since. I also love the topic that we’re going to be addressing today, and Kim, I love the lead in where you mentioned that it’s Forrester Consulting research report, so we’re actually using a third party analyst with what we discussed today. So I think it’s important for the audience to listen to this, because I think there’ll be some good information coming out of it. And we’ve got two guests that one I have known for decades, the other one I just met, but I wish that I had known for decades. And so let me introduce them, and we’ll bring them up. Brian Haines is the Chief Strategy Officer at FM:Systems, and is on the Johnson Controls digital solutions leadership team. Brian has over 30 years experience in software solutions and technology specifically aimed at optimizing building performance. Brian, you know we didn’t say in that 30 years, I’ve probably been one of your biggest pain in the rears as one of the biggest clients and using your product in various formats. But one other thing too, I don’t think in all that time we’ve known each other, and I just realized this reading a bit of the bio, I did not know you were actually a maintenance tech.

 

Eddy Wagoner  05:00

Mission in the US Navy, and that you also were a space planner while you were working on your Bachelor’s of Architecture at the University of Arizona. So you don’t just tell people how to do things with technology. Very similar to me, I know how to clean toilets. I know how to do some of the basic facility maintenance work. You also have that background, so I think that’s really important is people listen to us today that you know of which you speak having done that work, really glad that you’ve joined us today and looking forward to the discussion. Thank you. Eddie, our other guests, like I said when I started, his work has influenced what we do for several decades, but I just met him the other day, and I want to say, Where have you been all my life? And you’ll understand why when you hear his introduction. Vineet Sinha is the vice president of open blue Enterprise Solutions at Johnson Controls. You’ve been in real estate. You know Johnson Controls. They’re in every other building that we deal with, and I know especially in my work and my role, I’ve intersected with Johnson Controls for decades. Vineet brings 24 years of experience leading the product and engineering solutions, their go to market strategy and their customer experience, and he’s been the primary product leader responsible for launching their software as a service solution for energy and sustainability, predictive maintenance, healthy buildings and occupant experience, couple of key categories that we’ve all been talking about for years and that we’re all looking to better leverage technology and data in our delivery. And then here’s the key thing, 67 patents and building control systems and smart building technologies. So you don’t just know how it works. Fine. You actually created this talking about so I’m so excited to have you joining us and sharing your expertise, coupled with the fact that you’ve helped numerous fortune 100 companies with their technology modern, modernization and digital programs and your international experience, I think, brings a very needed viewpoint, especially to our international audience. So with that chance, if we can, let’s jump right into it. And I’m going to start with Brian, since I’ve known him for years, and he knows I can be a bit of a fire starter, sure, Brian, if you think about it, we in real estate. We’re at the end of the year, and everybody has their predictions for next year. And here’s what you need to do for the next year, and here’s the budget you need to have. And you know, AI this? Why this topic? Why should people listen to us today, when everybody else out there is kind of saying the same thing. What makes what we’re talking about different? Why do you think people should, over the next hour, pay attention, take some notes and take the advice that we’re going to give and put it into practice in 2025 so that they and their companies are in a better position?

 

Brian Haines  08:02

Yeah, that’s a great question, Eddie, and one of the things I think about is, through my career, I’ve seen a number of different, you know, sort of technology, evolutions, revolutions. I think we’re really standing on the precipice of an entirely new class of building the way we think about buildings, and that is smart buildings, and even slightly further down the road, which is not as far as you might think, autonomous buildings, where buildings themselves become a lot more well versed at actually operating themselves and providing feedback live to the owners operators who are operating those facilities every single day. So what’s amazing is that the technology evolution that continues to develop around, you know, connectivity, the cloud, IoT, devices, smart buildings, connected buildings, is that we’re really being hit with a massive amount of data right now coming from connected devices and and emerging smart building technologies. This data, when just simply handed to a human, it’s going to be really difficult to synthesize. It’s just too much for what we’re good at, which is other things, like decision making, etc. This amount of data really needs to be, I think, collated in a way, using technologies like AI, which Vineet and I are going to talk about quite a bit on this call, that truly provide tools to the audience that we’re talking to today that will absolutely revolution, revolutionize, not only the way you perform your job, but really up level the amount of information that we have available And and reporting and feedback that’s right at our fingertips instantly, like you were talking about my early career, Eddie and I always kind of laugh about that, because if I had been what I have now in terms of tools like, my job would have been just massively different. I can literally complete now in seconds using AI based technology.

 

Vineet Sinha  10:00

Technologies, what took me six months to produce back in the day when I was doing space and occupancy planning. So I think that that’s why this is really a set up and listen moment for the industry. Keep in mind, smart buildings, autonomous building controls. It’s coming fast. And you know, one of the things I was going to ask you about, and I’ll go to both of you on this is the, what are the key drivers in, what’s driving interest in smart building initiatives and the landscape changing? And I want to play off a little bit of what you just said, Brian, and even with, with my introduction, you know, there were no work orders back when I was cleaning toilets. Now there are robots that could clean toilets. And if I think over the decades of my career, it was a bit of a slow start when those technologies first started coming out, and it seemed like it would take forever to implement. And now it’s like almost daily. There’s some new technology initiative, or we’ve got Vineet with 67 patents, you know, he’s bringing us new stuff, left and right, and all the time that speed, it’s never going to be as slow as it was when you and I first started. It’s never going to be as slow as it is today. Everything is going faster and faster, and I think that’s a key point for our audience to think about. Is, whereas in the past, you could say, I’ve got a little bit of time for things to evolve, and while you still may on certain of these initiatives, you don’t have as much time as you used to have. You’ve got to make some decisions. You’re going to have to take some initial actions. And so as we talk about the drivers, you know, one of the other questions that we’ll get to in a bit is things that people can do now or things that they should start planning for. And so let’s make sure that we call those out as as people are talking but for both of you, what do you think are the key drivers behind this interest that people need to be aware of and watching for in their in their own organizations? And Vineet, I can start with you on that surely and again. Thanks. Thanks for the intro. And of course, thanks to all the audience joining from US and around the world. You know, any the way I think of it. And you know, like, like you said in the intro, right? I mean, I’ve been doing 24 years of technology, right? Did it in other domains to start with, and for, for about 13 years now, in the buildings domain, the big difference today is the amount of tech that is available to do the three C’s, as I call it, right, connect, compute and compose, right? That’s, that’s the big do different today. Today, we have the ability to connect a lot of things together, easier and faster than drawing cables and, you know, and connecting them physically, right? Lot of lot of virtual connectivity, lot of lot more wireless technology. And I would say wireless is not new, but reliable. Battery Powered wireless has certainly improved right now. To build on top of that, when you look at all of the computing power, right, whether it’s on a small device, appliance, sitting in the building, or, of course, right? The power of doing something in the cloud, followed by the ability to quickly compose a lot of workflows, use cases, etc, right? So, so what I am seeing in the last few years is this transition from fancy technology. Let’s just put a pretty UI to something that’s much more practical and truly following how a human persona might be responsible for executing a set of tasks in their day, in a week, in a month, right? And when technology enables that human to be more efficient, one, it frees up time. Second, obviously, it adds a lot more scale to the organization. And then third, I think all of us as humans want technology to work for us. I mean, I mean, look at the adoption of mobile phones, better cars, etc, right? In the same vein, this industry is as much looking to adopt more of tech, right, to facilitate completion of tasks and do so in a more reliable and predictable manner.

 

Eddy Wagoner  14:00

You know, it strikes me, and the audience may not know this, but we don’t practice these question and answers before. You guys are kind of sitting here as a victim of me a bit, but Vineet, I It struck me. I emphasize that because I actually did just have an aha moment. We’re talking tech. And in your answer, you didn’t talk a lot of tech, you talked a lot about the human side of it. And I think a lot of people with AI, let’s just face it, we’re afraid what we don’t know AI can do it faster. AI is going to replace your job. There’s all of these false narratives in some way, that are out there. And everything you said was about making it a human persona, empowering the human, helping the human be more efficient. And I just, I wanted to call that out, because I think that is something as people are thinking about, AI, let’s say, maybe even intimidated by it. Yeah, I love the fact that you’re thinking. And what Johnson Controls is thinking is about, how do you enable the human with this to be more efficient, to make the buildings more efficient? I want to also building optimization is something else that we talk about, and we could probably ask people in the comments. I won’t do this, but, you know, ask everybody give your definition of building optimization. We get 1000 different responses when you guys talk building optimization. What would you recommend our audience think about when they’re thinking about optimization? Brian, let me go to you with that. Yeah,

 

Brian Haines  15:31

the first thing that pops into my mind is that optimization is not a one time shot. You know, it’s not a one time deal. Optimizations continual based upon massive amounts of data inputs. Really, what we’re seeing is that facilities are not only getting more complex and more connected, but the way that humans interact with facilities has gotten quite chaotic. You know, post pandemic, when you look at utilization rates, the way that organizations have different institutional roles around what days of the week people need to be in or hybrid versus in person meetings. It’s really gotten very difficult to measure Well, technology has allowed us to measure that to a very fine level of control, and we’ve got insights into the way our buildings are actually performing in ways that we never could before. So going back to your question about optimization, we’re able to now take those massive numbers of them, not just utilization, but how utilization applies to all of the real estate functions, maintenance costs, operating costs, the costs for having security, everything we can take into account when we begin to understand truly how the building is being operated. We can do amazing things with that data in terms of optimizing it. I was on a call this morning, a Johnson Controls call looking at the way they’re using AI algorithms to optimize calling on campuses, which is really amazing, because they’re able to look at this data over time and then look at the cooling loads projected into the future, taking into account things like weather and temperature and all sorts of things, utilization, days on, days off, and actually have the building control system start to actually optimize heating and cooling to minimize carbon footprint, minimize energy usage. But this is continual Eddie, and that’s really where I think optimization lies. It’s not like you get it right the first time, but you continually iterate and improve based upon lots of data inputs. And I think that’s really the key. Love

 

Vineet Sinha  17:34

that, and if I can build on that, Eddie right again, similar to Brian yesterday, I was with another customer, again, we were talking about the, you know, preheating, pre cooling, optimizing, you know, space, space, set points and so on. And then one of the facilities stakeholders says, but by the way, I think we are in New York City, ventilation is our biggest problem, right? I mean, how are we dealing with with air quality, right? When, you know, in the context of energy now, in the past, right? This would have been, you know, shoot, let’s talk after a year, right? I mean, this, this was going to take a while. Now, the conversation was very different, great, right? We already are connecting IQ sensors. It’s a Common Data Platform. We have the correlations. We simply need to model the impact of increased or decreased ventilation or air turns in a space, and what does, what you know that does to energy performance, right? And, and, of course, not having a one size fit all across all spaces in that building, right? But kind of have the ability for an operator to choose which way they want to balance this equation, right? It was, it’s just so fascinating that in a 15 minute around the table conversation, right? We get to step 123, sure we can get it in a few weeks, right? Versus, versus making a bigger, you know, big, long term capital investment project out of it. And I think that’s that, for me, is the realization of what technology is doing in buildings, right? Because nothing static around us, right? Expectations are going to change, like you said in your intro, right? I mean, we can always say, if I you know 2025 is the year of achieving 10% budget cuts and energy efficiency and AI and all of that stuff. But in reality, all of this is continuous improvement, right? It’s building on top of what might already exist and extend it for those additional outcomes.

 

Eddy Wagoner  19:21

Excellent. And Vineet, while you were talking you, one of your comments reminded me of something that we did talk about when we met yesterday, when I first met you, and you mentioned New York and ventil ventilation. And I know that we have a bad habit of focusing on the US, and it is a massive global market, but there’s a whole world out there, and it doesn’t revolve around the US. And I remember yesterday you mentioned about Singapore and the work that they’re doing around sustainability and climate change, because they have some issues that other countries don’t. Have, or they’ve got a focus and some policies that put a little more front and center. And as I look in the chat, you know the I in IFMA stands for International and if you look at the chat, we have people from Nigeria that have joined us in Uganda, if must got a new chapter focusing on Africa, I know we have people that signed up from United Arab Emirates and Qatar. I see Puerto Rico, there’s probably a couple. So we’ve got people all over the world. And I remember when you talked yesterday, you said, you know, you may not be focused on certain things now, but when you’re ready, the learnings from Singapore will be in the technology there for you to take advantage of. Can we talk when I think optimization, and Brian talked continual? That’s something where I think about, you know, maybe I’m working on something elementary right now, but as I grow and as I learn, as I continually improve, there’ll be capabilities and learnings from other areas of the world that would be available to you in technologies like this is, you know, verify that what I’m saying is correct, but then also explain to people how, if they’re just starting with this, there’s a world, literally, a world, of opportunity, and using technology like this to get best practices from companies all over the world.

 

Vineet Sinha  21:16

Yeah, that’s, that’s, in fact, Eddie the most fascinating part of my role, right? Because I get to see this, right? I have that vantage point across the world, and Singapore continues to be a fascinating example, because they are, they have such a forward position as a country and as an economy when it comes to sustainability and operating efficiency. And for them, it’s, it’s, it’s a requirement to exist and grow, right? Given how small their their, you know, geographical footprint is, right? So, so the Building and Construction Authority, which is the primary authority right in Singapore, mandating all these rules, right? Since 2005 has has mandated a lot of energy efficiency measures. From 2013 brought in mandatory energy reporting, right? And their new position is what they call the mandatory energy improvements that will come into effect next year, which is essentially raising the bar on all of their certifications, right? So, similar to LEED, they have something called green mark, and achieving platinum green mark next year is much tougher, and it’s, it’s basically going to ensure that buildings adopt more of technology and AI in order to achieve those efficiency outcomes, right? So, you know, always, you know, have to think of it in layers, right? Here we might be talking about a lot of sensorization, lot of data privacy, hosting, all of those cases, right? And here you have an economy that has achieved a lot of that. They have had chiller, plant optimization guidelines and reporting for about a decade now. And now feels that, you know, the whole building, whole campus, type of efficiency measures are required, and the country is aiming to be, you know, carbon neutral by 2050 Right? Which essentially means that they need a big proportion of their buildings to be super energy efficient by 2030 right? So it’s, it’s, you know, it’s one of those examples which almost mandates me, as a product manager to ensure that our products are supporting those kind of needs. And once it’s in, we know we can take it to other economies, right? And that’s where I have another example from Saudi Arabia, right? A fast developing economy, country that’s changing more rapidly than anybody else today in the market, right? Wants to be the Dubai of the future, obviously, way bigger geographically than Dubai or the rest of UAE. So it’s it has also been another adventure for us, right, working with customers there to see how they would be adopting new green building standards and emissions, right, everything from the capital city in Riyadh to projects like Neom, right, which are completely built or designed to be sustainable smart cities of the future. So interesting mixes there, right? But we love what, what’s happening through the BCS and green marks and neighbors and and and the well buildings of the world, right? Because it is institutionalizing practices that, end of the day, create better, smarter spaces for for all of us, right, who are occupying, working and living in them.

 

Eddy Wagoner  24:21

And let me just and correct me if I’m wrong, but if I’m hearing you correctly, you guys are looking at all these different standards rolling out. You’re actually incorporating that into the product. Great. Okay,

 

Brian Haines  24:34

Yeah, I think Eddie, the point to another point to make, is that many of our clients and many of the organizations that we work with have either regional or often global real estate portfolios. So it’s not just about a local problem. It could be a global problem as well. So when they put a stake in the ground and they say, we’re going to be a net zero company, and all of our facilities are going to be net zero, the implications can be quite different. Geographic. When you think about the requirements, how people come into the office, the technologies that are available, all of it really when you look at it from a global standpoint, it really needs to also roll down locally, so that you understand those local requirements that you’re supporting. The ultimate global goal.

 

Eddy Wagoner  25:17

Reminds us of that think globally, but act locally. So all of this sounds incredible, but as we know, the devil’s in the details, right? So let’s talk a little bit about some of the common challenges that the organizations that are that our audience represents are going to be facing when they try to integrate smart building technologies. And beneath this is something I mentioned to you. I said, you know, for for years, I would tell people I could integrate data from anywhere, and I would wait for someone to say, oh, but that systems closed, and that’s often an inhibitor. And you were telling me how, yeah, there was, there was a time when the building systems were all closed, but that’s starting to evolve as people are realizing the competition, if you will, is at a different levels and how you use the data. So could you talk a little bit about how that’s changing? That’s a challenge that’s maybe going away, or maybe not as big of a challenge as it used to be? And then if you guys could share the challenges that you’re seeing people face, just so our audience knows what they should be looking at.

 

Vineet Sinha  26:26

Yeah, look. I mean, as a technologist, it goes against my grain to ever build something or recommend the customer, to take something that is proprietary, right? I mean, you know when, when open blue had to be named. The word open was was specifically made part of it. So it always guides how we think and design our product, right? So, I mean, similarly, right, not just with open blue, but, you know, we are obviously there is a much bigger stock of existing buildings which might have a lot of legacy technology, right? So looking at ways of grabbing data from them, right, in order to get that holistic picture is obviously a big portion of what we do. And let’s be real, right? In some cases, you know, retrofit might be required, right? Or something might have to be changed if something is too old to get any kind of data collection mechanisms right. But, I mean, this is where the old and the new blend together, right? You know, when you and I have to look at a user interface and understand what what a smart system is telling us, right? We should not have to care about complexities that are three layers deep, right? We ideally want to have good benchmarking, good comparison of building a with Building B, right? Normalize it for weather, normalize it for usage, right? But get to a common point where it’s where it can drive real improvement action, right? So, so that’s the philosophy going in and and, you know, Brian coming from FM:Systems, right, having no linkage to open blue prior, prior to our merger, right? I would love for him to add more on how he saw it and what, what we are doing together now,

 

Brian Haines  27:57

yeah, so it’s, that’s a great question, and I love the vision and the ability to be able to touch all aspects of the facility. Now, whereas, you know previously, you’ve heard me say this before, beneath it, it really felt like much of what we did was below the ceiling, and much of what Johnson Controls was like above the ceiling or in the walls, being able to unify that is, is really exciting for me, because it allows us to be able to touch all aspects of the building and also kind of bridge the gap between building engineer and facilities teams in ways. You know, it’s funny Eddie, I think about AI is like the universal translator, like, if you’ve ever watched Star Trek, like it can, it can speak multiple languages, and I’m not talking languages of country languages, but it can, it can say things between myself and an engineer in ways that make sense to me as just kind of a normal, you know, facility operator, and which I think is is really exciting and fantastic. Now, the problem going back to connectivity and sort of this interoperability of data. You know, I think we, in the past, we all like to believe that you can have a proprietary system, and that, you know, clients who had really complex global real estate portfolios would just adopt everything you have. And the truth is, that’s not a really good strategy. I was talking to a global energy leader just a month ago out of the UK, and they’ve got three different CMMS systems globally, and those all came into their sort of portfolio through acquisitions and things. They also have multiple building control systems. Their problem is getting data from all of those to talk and to be unified in a way that they can report, understand, apply AI algorithms across that’s where the power is. Eddie is being able to bring that data together and not tell a client listen. You’ve got to drop the things that are working for you and adopt this other thing. It’s about identifying what those things are, identifying what you’re trying to solve, and then put together the best. Solution, and that’s often going to require you to bring data together from multiple disparate systems, regardless of whether or not they’re Johnson control systems or competitors, it doesn’t matter. It’s honestly doing what’s best for the client to operate their portfolios that way.

 

Eddy Wagoner  30:15

So let me ask from a challenge perspective, because I know for a lot of our audience as facility managers. They are in a leased building, so they’re dependent on the building management system the owner has put in place. And a lot of ownership entities don’t switch out the technologies. If they’re working, they won’t necessarily upgrade them, because they’re looking at, returns on the investment. I’ll make a strong statement, and then I’ll see if you guys agree or disagree. I think with the challenges that we’re seeing post COVID and with excess space that the building owners that do not upgrade their technologies and open it up to operate interoperate with, what we’re talking about will become less desirable properties, and we’ll lose market share. So that, that would be a prediction that I would put out there, and I think we’re already starting to see that in some markets, in some areas. What do you guys? Are you seeing that as a challenge right now, where people, facility managers, occupants, want to do more of this, but the building they’re in has a closed system, or they’re not quite as open to working with this. Or what are you seeing there from that challenge perspective?

 

Vineet Sinha  31:31

Yeah, I think when it comes to a large global enterprise customers, majority of their footprint tends to be in leased buildings, right? So, again, reality, right? I mean, if you’re working with the REIT, obviously there is much more freedom, right? Because they own the property and can and can deploy technology. I think there are multiple ways to solve it, right? And what we are seeing is customers being open to establish their own ot sensor networks, which might be independent of the BMS, but still give them a lot of insights like this, right? So I touched upon the indoor air quality example before, but you can do something similar with traffic movement, right? With meeting space utilization, utilization of amenities lockers, right? We have had another customer example where availability of lockers was a big decision point in in consolidating offices, right? Because they were going to a completely, you know, complete hot desking, type of, type of approach versus assigned seating that they had in the past, right? So again, these are all things that can be independent of the BMS, but wherever we can get into the BMS, right? Obviously, the layer or the levels of insights can increase, but see, but this is where it’s not a, you know, it’s not an all or nothing type of approach, right? It’s a question of what, what one is trying to achieve, and then work back from those outcomes into what the prerequisites and insights would be.

 

Eddy Wagoner  32:56

Yeah, I love that you said it’s not all or nothing. If I think use the example of the one client that was looking at lockers, it might be a first for me. But I think the point there is, in your own unique situation, no matter where you are in the world, there’s opportunities. You’re not, you know, having to follow what everyone else is doing. So there’s opportunities there in that uniqueness. And then I would assume that if someone in our audience were to reach out to you guys after the call, you’re not going to leave them hanging to go talk to the building owner about the BMS systems and the implementation. You actually help with that or help have the discussions with those technologies. So we’re not asking FMS that Brian I love for you talked about AI can help, you know, people like us that are technologists, talk to some of the engineers you know, in a better way, but I would assume there’s opportunities here for people such as yourselves to help the facility managers as they have these discussions. We’re not just leaving them hanging on their own, correct? It can be a little bit of a curse. Eddie, I’ll tell you why I keep I keep wanting to laugh because we just opened a new corporate headquarters for FM:Systems in Raleigh about six or eight months ago. That space has more technology packed into it for measuring building performance than you could ever imagine. You’ve got to come visit because we’ve got tons of different occupancy sensors. We’ve got indoor air quality sensors, we’ve got everything security, everything packed in there, but it is a leaf space, and one of the things we did was we actually worked with JLL as our real estate

 

Vineet Sinha  34:40

Manager the company. We love them, the vision for what they produce, but we’re probably there. We probably drive them crazy, because we complain a lot about the temperature and like and things that are happening because we have massive amounts of data. And I’m sending as matter of fact this morning, there’s a whole thread going back and forth where one of our product managers has a bunch of floor plans with temperature gradients across the floor plan and time of day when people were there, and he’s sending that to the property manager and saying, you know, and they come in and they use these devices, and they measure like the air temperature they’re using, like, you know, to measure, like, the heat signature of the and they make some adjustments, and then they leave and they say it’s all fixed. And we’re like, no, actually, it’s not. So I, for some reason, that just made me laugh, because you were saying own versus leased space. If we had complete and total control of the building control system, we’d be, we would be applying that data to the system, to, you know, have it make the decisions for us. But in this, in this instance, I have to put in a work ticket, and someone’s got to come and solve that problem for me. But, like, it’s a little bit of a curse. We’ve got so much technology, we know exactly what’s happening, which is pretty cool. It’s, it’s interesting. You say that when I, one of my very early jobs, was managing the work order call center, and we had this joke that it was like, our frequent flyers that would call every day, I’m too hot, I’m too hot. And it’s like, yeah, that’s, that’s relative. And you just mentioned, no, you actually have the data now where you can tell where it is too hot. And it’s not just the, you know, the census is the real data. And I also think too where you mentioned, you know, if you had complete control, you could make the changes. I actually predict that that will happen in the future. It might be a little bit further out, but I think that the owners of the buildings will start adopting some of the integration capabilities, because that cuts some of their service calls, but it also will help drive some of the efficiencies if we’re using that data. Brian, the HQ is in North Carolina, the Raleigh Durham area, and that was an open invitation for anybody on the call that are in Raleigh Durham to reach out to you and come see this product and play. Yeah, there you have. It’s people that are talking about it are actually using it. So if you’re on the call and your travels, bring you to the southern US. Brian just gave you an open invitation. Excellent. I’ll be there. And also I’m just going to let Vineet address this. You were saying, you were sort of saying that this idea that we could make those changes was somewhere out in the future. It’s here now. I mean, we’re doing that. So, yeah, I mean, I mean, this is where the world of closed loop autonomous control comes in, right? I mean, wherever you have the ability to control devices directly or through the BMS, right, has started to become real. Now. It still builds right on the concept of having trust in the AI, right? You still have to make it very transparent. You need to tell users, right, what your references of data are, why you’re making a recommendation, right? The impact of executing a recommendation, but what is, again, philosophically, our approach is to always give users the option to run a system in an advisory or in auto mode, right? And it’s something that we have practiced with our children plant optimization solutions for several years, right? So we have seen, seen this movie play out, right? We have seen why it takes, sometimes days and sometimes weeks and months to establish trust with the building’s team right, where they can truly believe that the AI is recommending changes that are either similar to what they have done or exceed their ability to do it, not because, you know, they did not have the knowledge, but just because it there was so much data to process and make decisions of, right? That’s where technology comes in, right? But, but once you have that confidence, you turn it in auto mode, we are seeing facilities, right? We are seeing plants around 80, 90% of the time in auto mode. And there is no faster way to achieve savings, right? Because obviously the system will do things that it needs to do again within its you know, within configured constraints and articulate all of those actions for you. And we have seen efficiencies come out of even LEED platinum or other highly certified Class A buildings, right? Because there’s always something that can be squeezed. You know, that’s where modeling all of the different scenarios, right? And you can do it almost on an infinite basis with AI now, Vineet, it’s interesting. You talked about all the data coming in, and

 

Eddy Wagoner  39:45

Much information coming that, yes, there’s more than the human could possibly process. But talk a little bit about how AI, you know, helps us with all of that data. How do you address the questions on the screen now?

 

Vineet Sinha  40:15

Yeah, I’ll share an example, right? And I see some people have joined from from Qatar, right? So, open blue had supported the FIFA Soccer World Cup in Qatar in 2022 right across all of the eight stadiums, and that was a classic example. Right on match days, we could get as many as 90,000 alarms coming in, and AI was passing through them and focusing the top 10 to 20, right? That really needed some action or attention, right? The rest were more like breaches, which, which were transient in nature, right? So the truly actionable, important ones could then translate into an action from the centralized command center, right? I mean, that remains my favorite example, because you know, all of us who have been in the BMS world know, you know, you can log into anybody’s BMS and see about 100,000 alarms that might be in snows more, right, that have not been actioned. And that’s a classic example of having too much information, right? And the same thing can happen with digital overlays, right, if you don’t apply the right level of filtering and prioritization.

 

Brian Haines  41:16

Yeah. Eddie I, I was thinking about this. The question really is like how much information is too much for a human right to just sort of be able to take in. There’s also how much information is too much for, you know, a cloud enterprise solution to take in. I think really, it comes down to how that information is sort of collated and presented. Back for years, you know, we’ve been, and we’ve been doing this ourselves, been producing these beautiful dashboards with lots of line charts and pie charts and, you know, things. And I always ask our solution to consultants when they’re doing demonstrations to clients, what? What is the story behind what we’re looking at? That’s, that’s what I want to hear about. I don’t want to just say, Listen, we could do pie charts and we could do graphs, and we can do all these things. I want to hear what the data is telling us. One of the things that we introduced recently, we call them narratives, which takes those pie charts and diagrams and uses AI to actually tell you in a brief narrative next to the chart what it’s saying, and it’s just basically kind of translating. It’s like that engineer to operator translation, right? It takes this sort of complex view, where you would have needed a data analyst, probably in the past, and just simply tells you exactly what you’re looking at. You can also ask, so you can ask these complex data sets questions with natural language. It used to take someone, you know, writing SQL queries, if anybody knows what that is, and you know, complex queries, doing data analysis, to get answers out of these systems. With these large language models and generative AI, you can just simply ask the way a human would ask and get answers back the way you would expect a human to answer, which I think is massively powerful. And that’s really, I think that’s the sea change that I was talking about at the beginning of this conversation. I don’t think this is like any other time in my career, where I could simply ask for questions I can and it’s not just a yes, no answer. It’s a Tell me. Tell me the, you know, the five buildings that I have out of 100 buildings that I’m operating that have the most significant problems that I need to address this week, and summarize the steps that I need to take to solve those problems. I mean, you’re going to get answers that are well deep, as long as the information is, quality data, you know, it’s got to be, it’s got to be curated data that in your IWMs or CMMS, it’s got to be data and your BMS that’s accurate, reliable, is curated. So, you know, it’s good, it’s, it’s complete, to really get the good answers. That’s that’s something I want this audience to learn. You just can’t turn AI loose on a spreadsheet with very minimal data and get much out of that you need. You need it to really kind of be unleashed on really, really large amounts of information to get the really deep, insightful answers. Hey, Brian, I want to you mentioned SQL queries, and you know, part of my claim to fame way back is I could write some mean SQL queries, but let me see if I’m hearing you correctly.

 

Eddy Wagoner  44:29

You’re saying it’s almost like Star Trek, where Captain Kirk would say to the enterprise, he would ask a question conversationally, and the computer would answer is that what you’re saying when you say conversational it’s like you’re basically eliminating it. Guys like me, where you have to go and say, write a query to get me this information, and you, the facility manager, can ask the computer conversation conversationally. No. SQL training requires that what you’re saying absolutely.

 

Brian Haines  44:59

And that’s here and now, I mean, I invite the audience if you, if you just like to try it out, go get a free login to chat GPT or one of the other AI programs that allow you free access and just try out some simple stuff. It’s gotta, you know, it’s gotta have availability or access to data. But you can do some pretty incredible stuff when you take that sort of basic view, and then you start to embed it into enterprise systems like what we’re producing with massive connected data Eddie, you’re able to get amazingly powerful insights across a lot of different functional areas simply by asking. You don’t need to write complex queries. And do you know, use BI tools to do massive amounts of like data analysis manipulation, you can simply ask, but also so world workplace, Minneapolis at the FM:Systems booth, we’re going to see a Captain Kirk chair for facility managers. Conversation. We need. And I have already talked about, we’re already chatting back and forth. We we could probably do that, maybe minus the actual chair that looks like Captain Kirk here, unless someone’s got one lying around or they want to build one for us. But you could certainly, we could certainly show that now you know what you bring the technology. We’ll get the chair that’ll make it a booth. So for people who are attending world workplace, we got a couple of a little bit of time before that, but come and kick the tires, as they say, and try it out. Got a couple of other questions that let me throw out. So one of the questions that that that we had come in related to examples of intelligent building reports and dashboards. We’re actually going to put some examples and the deliverable that we’ll send to the audience after the webinar. So I’ve already talked to the team in the background about that, so we’ll get you some of those examples. You can also reach out to our panelists later if you have other questions. Thomas Z had a question. What are the your thoughts regarding balancing net zero energy usage goals versus occupant comfort?

 

Vineet Sinha  47:12

Yeah, so, so let me take that one, and I would love to actually also loop in the last question from Christy in there around privacy concerns, right? Because, you know, one health warning, right? When we when we talk about about large language models, right? And you go to chat GBD, or any of the AI interfaces, of course, when you ask those questions, right? And you supply data, you’re sending it into a public domain, right? So, so, so, from an approach perspective, right? What we tell customers is that it’s important that the llms that apply to you ensure that the data is coming from your buildings and it’s not going out into the public domain where everybody sees, oh, this is, this is how the building is reporting consumption, right? So it’s still all contained across, you know, in kind of a secure box. When we apply, when we take the data and look at insights, you know, through through generative AI based recommendations, right? And typically when we access public sources of data, right, to inform or enrich those, those large language models, we are doing it in a way where the data, where that information is coming inbound, right, versus customers or a building’s data being sent out. So, so that’s a very important factor, right? And that’s why, when it comes to questions, right, like Thomas’s question on balancing net zero goals, right, with occupant comfort, right? It has to be specific to that space, right, to that building, to that campus, right? You don’t want a generic answer. You need something that is helping you balance between your current energy performance, the gap that you have towards achieving net zero, and what your occupancy and occupants are, right. So the balance between those these two is obviously a classic problem, right? What we have seen is that you know, if you have to deliver right, depending on what units you’re following. If you have to deliver 72 degree air or deliver 24 degrees Celsius air, right? There are ways to deliver it in efficient ways and in inefficient ways, right? So if you’re looking for whole building implementation, right, or whole building optimization, it has to look at the entire set of systems that are helping supply air at that temperature. And of course, then you have ambient conditions, right? The flow of air can sometimes impact how you actually feel in a space, right? Versus, versus static. So, so, so that’s where the optimization comes in, Thomas, right? I mean, you’re looking at occupant needs. You, in some cases, might even give occupants the ability to control thermostats or control it through an app. But in the larger scheme of things, you’re looking at how you operate your your equipment in the most efficient ways, how you look at techniques like pre cooling, preheating in order to achieve those same ambient conditions at lower costs, how you might play with sources of utility, right, whether it’s coming from expense.

 

Brian Haines  50:00

Say, versus, you know, renewables, like, like solar, and make those decisions on a real time basis, right? So, again, lot, lots of ways to help balance that equation. But, you know, you look at energy, you look at comfort, you look at air quality, it’s, it’s a trifecta, right? And you’re trying to find the right midpoint that works for your business. Yeah, I’m going to add a little bit to that, because I just spoke on a topic around AI and how it’s going to really revolutionize space and scenario planning at trade line space strategies last month. And this question was actually asked by someone in the audience, could AI help this and and what I think is amazing, is everything that Vineet just said, but also think about it, taking into account even more complex ideas, and this is possible. When you talk about occupant comfort, is it occupant comfort? You’re just asking the occupants if they’re comfortable or not, or is it something a lot more nuanced, and I think interesting looking at utilization patterns, looking at productivity, looking at a lot of different factors as related to the way that you manage the building control system and heating and cooling space. You you could potentially take all of that data and look at it through this lens, with AI as sort of the carrier for that data and really find some really interesting correlations. One of the ones that I was telling you, Eddie, is that we looked at one of our, one of our, one of our development teams was doing a hackathon project, and they wanted to look at, does temperature affect utilization? He just wanted to look so they looked at utilization over two years, and then they looked at weather data over two years, and they found out that for every one degree increase in temperature outside, utilization inside went up. I mean, I never would have thought about that. I there’s probably a much more complex reason as to why that is, but that’s kind of amazing stuff. If you start laying into account, taking into account, all kinds of factors, as long as you can get the data, things like productivity, happiness, why are people sitting where they sit? Are they sitting there because there’s light? Is it quiet? What are the CO two levels? What are the what’s the temperature, humidity? Is it affecting the way we feel about the space, and then actually taking all of that and applying it to the way the building is actually operating? That is amazing stuff. And I think that that is not that that’s here now. You could actually do it now, and I think it’s going to revolutionize the way we think about operating our buildings. Yeah, oh, Eddie, you’re muted.

 

Eddy Wagoner  52:47

Sorry about that. The IT guy always has problems with this technology. There was something that you said, Brian, and something I’ve talked about for years. You know, we always focus on the real estate data, and people would focus on always like work orders as an example, but there’s so much other data out there that could help predict and used weather as an example. And I think this is the opportunity with AI and the ability to use that massive amounts of data from so many sources to drive insights that we’ve dreamed about but didn’t have the capability to handle, or maybe access to the data, or the compute power to deal with it. And so I think that’s something as people are thinking about this, you know, kind of expand your horizons in the way you’re thinking about the data you could use. And there’s so much outside of the Real Estate Organization that could benefit the Real Estate Organization the need, I want to come back quickly. We had an earlier question about privacy concerns, and I know you’ve done a lot of work internationally, and in my experience, you can have a good privacy stance, but depending on the industry or the country that you’re in, there are different regulatory requirements. There’s GDPR in Europe. You know, if you’re in financial you’ve got one set of regulations to make your regulators happy. If you’re in insurance or health care, there’s a whole different set of requirements. How are we able to address it? I’m assuming the answer you gave earlier that applies to that, that you’ve taken those considerations for those different clients where you’re working with them, into account. But I wanted to give you the opportunity to expand on that, as people are thinking about leveraging AI and how you’re thinking about those different requirements.

 

Vineet Sinha  54:37

Yeah, and it’s a great question. It’s an important one, and I think in us as an industry, again, need to be super conscious about solutions we are adopting. Right? Because, you know, data privacy is one broad term that factors in, data residency, data security, cross border, data sharing, right? All of those aspects come in and they get amplified. When it comes to personally identifiable information, right? So, so for us, it has been, again, a design philosophy to meet those standards, right, whether it’s GDPR or equivalent other standards, right? But end of the day, what’s most important is ensuring that building our customers data is secure, right? It doesn’t mean that it’s being it’s being made visible to somebody else, right? Even if you try to look for peer benchmarks, it’s completely anonymized, right? So that way you don’t have competitors looking at each other’s performance, right? And apart from that, right? I mean, also, there’s a question of cyber security here, right? How is data being stored? How it’s being, you know how it’s transitioning through networks, right? The proper levels of encryption for it, so, so all of those are factors Eddie in this, right? And it’s important for anybody buying technology to ask those questions of their suppliers. Look for those certifications. Look for independent endorsements of somebody who has audited the technology and can confirm that, that it’s doing, that it’s one, it’s meeting those standards, and it’s doing what, what they’re saying, you know, supposed to do, excellent.

 

Eddy Wagoner  56:11

We’re getting close then. And I’ve got four questions I want to hammer through quickly. I want to address one has a question, is structural health monitoring included as a standard in the solution.

 

Brian Haines  56:26

I will say, Vineet, we don’t do that specifically. What’s that

 

Vineet Sinha  56:33

you’re correct, right?

 

Brian Haines  56:34

I think we do interesting things like vibration analysis, however, of equipment, which can tell you a lot about how that equipment is operating. I suspect that the structural engineer structural industry is probably the same, but that’s not our specific, you know, area of expertise.

 

Eddy Wagoner  56:54

Good, excellent. Thanks for that. So there’s probably a lot of advice you would give people if they’re saying, Okay, I want to start this journey. But let’s go around and give one quick piece of advice. If you do nothing else, and I’ll start if you do nothing else, don’t do this on your own. Have a conversation. I mean, you could reach out. Brian’s already said online, reach out to him, you know, on LinkedIn, or if you want to come visit. But I think if you’re thinking about this journey, don’t do it alone. Reach out. You’ve got vanit here, you’ve got Brian here. There’s a lot of resources that you can just talk to and get help. So I would my advice would be, keep the conversation going. Vineet and then Brian. What would you advise the audience if they’re going to start on this journey? What’s the one thing you must do this. What would you suggest?

 

Brian Haines  57:44

Go ahead, Google first. Okay, I’ll go first. The easy one is to identify the problem that you’re trying to solve for and then pick the best solution to solve that problem and make sure that it’s got the ability ability to be scalable if it works and you want to take it to a broader set of problems. I really think that’s that’s it. The second component of that is no buildings too new or too old. I think if you looked at smart building technology, it was really, you know, targeted towards base building design and construction maybe a decade ago. But the truth is, we’ve got clients who have buildings in in Europe that are hundreds of years old, several 100 years old, that they’re applying smart building technologies to now, quite easily, you can adopt some of these things to address specific problems. So I think, identify the problem that you’re trying to solve and pick the technology and just go for it. Try it, try it out. Vineet,

 

Vineet Sinha  58:39

yeah, the first thing I would say is, data is your friend, right? Don’t be shy of collecting data, because that will give you insights that you may or may not have have known, right? And then second, right? AI is not black magic, right? AI is driven by the data that’s coming in your buildings, and it will identify ways in making you as an individual more effective and your buildings more efficient, right? So, so that’s what we are here to do. And would love to, you know, see how it grows across the world over the next, you know, few months and years.

 

Eddy Wagoner  59:10

So we’re doing our webinar just literally days away from 2025 everybody likes resolutions and predictions, so quickly in the new year. What’s the one big trend or innovation that you think organizations should be aware of in the building space?

 

Vineet Sinha  59:32

So, so maybe I can go, go first here, right? I think you know, about two years ago we saw generative AI come in as a new concept. Right now, you’re seeing generative AI show up in smart building solutions. The next big step is going to be around AI agents. And again, it’s not black magic. It just simply means that it’s a fully independent AI service that can do something for you and that you can plug based. Your respective needs, right? So it’s an interesting thing. We’ll watch out and obviously be one of the leaders in taking into the industry, but still very focused on what it does for our user personas and business impact. We’re not going to do a tech for the sake of doing techdata. Brand.

 

Eddy Wagoner  1:00:18

You already being quoted? Vineet, he’s already being quoted in the in the comments. Brian, bring us home.

 

Brian Haines  1:00:24

I think AI moves beyond tire kicking to problem solving in ways that we’re actually going to see stories come out where significant building problems are solved through the use of this technology. We’re going to see a lot of that. We’ll also start to see the first stories come out about autonomous building controls in ways that are revealing insights that we could have never imagined within our facilities.

 

Eddy Wagoner  1:00:49

Excellent, we started out at the very beginning. Brian, you said optimization is continual. I think a lot of the discussion that we’ve had today indicates this is not a one and done. This is a continual journey, so I would invite our audience to continue the conversation with us. If you are not regularly following ifma.org there’s a wealth of resources there. We will be sending out a summary via email to all the registered attendees. We’ll put links and some other information in there for you. I would also encourage you, if you’re not currently subscribed to if must connected FM podcast, do that and not so subtle plug. I am hosting some of those episodes, and if you liked hearing from Brian and Vineet and would like to hear more, send us your ideas or suggestions on what you’d like to hear about, and I’ll use that to get them to do an episode with us in 2025 to further discuss this topic or any other that you would like to hear from. And with that, thank you to everybody around the world that joined us today to talk about a technology that certainly in some ways, came on as fast, but it will be something that will revolutionize the way that we operate our buildings and optimize the experience that our occupants and our organizations get out of the physical world that we all live in. Thank you, Brian, so much in Vineet for your time and your expertise, and to our audience for the gift of your time. And I’ll turn it back over to our if my staff, thank you so much for your work in helping put this webinar on for our audience.

 

Moderator  1:02:25

Thank you. Thank you. Applause.