ENERGY MANAGEMENT

Steel, concrete, wiring, plumbing—these things make a building. But what makes a smart building? And how does a smart building evolve to be a smart and sustainable building? These questions have grown more pressing with the current push to bring workers back into an office, increasing occupancy and subsequent pressure on building systems. New buildings have an advantage here of being able to incorporate sustainability and smart systems from the get-go, but what about older buildings? Are they beyond the help of technological solutions?

Answering some of these questions are Lauren Long, VP of Brand and Marketing at Nantum AI (formerly known as Prescriptive Data), and Maciej Labuszewski, Onboarding Specialist at Blue Bolt, a cutting-edge solutions provider (Video 1). They discuss the role that smart buildings can play in fighting the climate change crisis, the reason to incorporate AI and data into smart building solutions, and the benefits of partnering with the best technology to power the best solutions, because these are complicated systems and ambitious, important goals, and it all involves so much more than just remembering to turn off the lights.

What actually defines a smart, sustainable building?

Lauren Long: Every building is different—when it was built, the style it was built in, the materials used, the climate it’s in. So there is no one answer to what sustainability looks like. But all sustainable buildings do share common characteristics, and many of those revolve around intent. You want to avoid waste: So you turn off lights in empty rooms, you use low-flush toilets, you seal the windows, etc. There are many things you can do on that sort of level.

But if you take it a step further and think about the technology aspects, that’s how you really make a building smarter and more sustainable. And it’s because of the data being collected and, hopefully, acted on. But you can’t improve without a baseline, so it’s important to understand what’s happening today and then to make an improvement plan.

The built world is said to be responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions, and 28% of that is from operational processes—so everything it takes to make a building comfortable and keep it operating as it should. If we even made building operations 50% more efficient than they are currently, that would decrease global emissions by 14% alone, and that’s a pretty sizable impact.

A 2024 real estate outlook report from Deloitte says that only 5% of buildings are fully modernized, which means that they have core systems that can easily incorporate emerging digital technologies. However, the report also says that 34% of buildings are mostly converted to these modernized systems, and 30% are currently transitioning from legacy models.

As sensors feed into building systems and give operators more data, change can actually happen. So while buildings are definitely part of the problem, they also have a unique ability to be part of the solution and be role models for other industries.

What do building owners and managers need to focus on in their sustainability efforts?

Maciej Labuszewski: In recent years a lot has been done in areas such as recyclable construction materials and streamlining building processes. But at the same time there has been a shift in the focus around how a building can not only be built sustainably but also exploited sustainably throughout its lifetime. And with more and more aging properties accumulating on the market, achieving a net-zero goal and decreasing a carbon and plastic footprint is an absolute necessity in extending the lifetime of buildings that will otherwise be considered obsolete very soon.

In practice, there are two vectors that building owners focus on. The first is reducing inefficiencies arising from the use of old systems and incorrect assumptions around patterns of heating, light, air conditioning. These incorrect assumptions often stem from a lack of data—data that could help identify targets, set performance indicators, and pinpoint unnecessary costs. But when that data is not available, it becomes essentially impossible to formulate a strategy, let alone implement it successfully.

The second vector is engaging tenants in changing their own consumption patterns. However, in a building with many diverse tenants this is a very difficult task. It requires appropriate communications, appropriate rewards, and of course the time for it to come into effect.

Blue Bolt addresses these issues by considering sustainability factors as integral to every capability that we provide to a building. One example is switching from classic access-control tools—plastic cards and remote controls—to access that is fully stored on a mobile phone. In a big office building, plastic consumption just on access cards can amount to almost 200 kilos per year.

What recent technological innovations make these solutions possible?

Maciej Labuszewski: I think here it’s important to start off by stating clearly that just having a building app is not a game changer in the property market anymore. Many of those mobile solutions only deliver functionalities that are tailored to certain, isolated, very narrow problems and target very specific property portfolios. They simply lack the scope and scale to accommodate the needs of owners, administrations, and tenants.

Building managers now have their sights set on more complex solutions, the ones that can deliver measurable results and have universal capabilities across an entire portfolio with uniform ESG standards, guest management, and resources that don’t require a lot of time to effect the switch from the traditional methods—the access cards and remote controls—so that results can be felt immediately. A strong focus is also placed on the cost-effectiveness of the solution.

This is something that Blue Bolt excels in, because our system employs hardware with excellent flexibility and adaptability that allows us to install it on essentially any building and deploy the entire system within a few days no matter how old the building is. This ties to my previous point about this accumulating pile of aging properties.

What is the role of AI in making buildings smart and sustainable?

Lauren Long: AI and machine learning are definitely tools to help us reach our goals. Data can be consolidated into a unified user interface, and then you can dig into it to find patterns, correlations, or causational relationships between different types of data. It’s almost impossible to try to keep tabs on all that data as a human; AI is the only way to make it scalable. And there’s always the element of human error to factor in.

Where we are in the industry in terms of using all this data is really unique. I often recommend the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore from a marketing perspective. But the building space is in a really similar situation, so you could say we need to cross the engineering chasm. Let me build the situation for you.

In building operations there are sustainability managers, and they are the goal-setters. They collaborate to set goals, find solutions, and track progress around building sustainability. There are also the asset managers, who are the cost-optimizers. They analyze, invest in, and manage real estate for long-term value and sustainability.

Think about the #technology aspects, that’s how you really make a building smarter and more #sustainable. And that’s because of the #data being collected and, hopefully, acted on. @nantumai via @insightdottech

But then there’s a third group—the building operators, who are the change-makers. They maintain efficient operations and optimize building performance for sustainability. And the chasm I mentioned is between the first two groups and the building operators when there isn’t any real-time performance data.

But without actually using the data when you have it, what’s the point? Using AI to make actionable insights is really important for creating real-time accountability. This is something Nantum AI does with daily AI engineering recommendations and also our compliance analysis, where we’re able to assess the number of recommendations that our system sends to the engineers, the number of them that are actually acted upon, and then the resulting success of that.

Do you have any examples of how owners can make sustainability changes?

Maciej Labuszewski: One of our very first clients was a coworking-space brand and the owner of commercial real estate with offices located in five countries. One of the Blue Bolt features that really caught their attention and that proved really successful was switching off elevators during off-peak hours. This is something that is helped by our AI system, which aggregates the data from the building’s access control and the elevator systems and combines it into easily navigable information that can be viewed by property owners and asset managers. It is this kind of solution that guarantees that we are not just another gadget but a tool that helps make informed decisions on a daily basis.

Lauren Long: One of our favorite focal points at Nantum AI is helping companies meet their energy conservation measures, or ECMs. One of our customers is Jamestown Properties; they have the Waterfront Plaza in San Francisco. They wanted to use Nantum AI to generate savings with a smart shutdown during the day, changing the building system’s operations based on real-time occupancy. Against a 2019 baseline they have saved over $71,000 and almost 285,000 kilowatts of energy. Just that small change in building operations can make a difference.

Talk about the technology partners that help create these solutions.

Lauren Long: We focus mostly on the software aspect, and we partner with a lot of companies that have access to accurate and precise data. The better the data in, the better the data out, right? But we also rely heavily on hardware, and we have found that buildings that are powered by Intel chips have the most capacity to become smart.

All of our buildings operate on an Intel Gateway, and this makes us a perfect partner with Intel. Our goal is to become the smarter-building provider for every building in the world—and I believe that every building could become a smart building. This is made possible and powered by Intel.

What else should people think about in the smart building journey?

Maciej Labuszewski: We’ve been talking about technology, but something very important to mention in the context of sustainability is that it must also be used to unite people over a common goal. We are talking about something that isn’t just a business decision but also an ethical decision that may impact the collective future.

The solutions that we are working on at Blue Bolt—it’s not just a business model to realize but also a higher concept that is good to have in mind when thinking about the needs of our stakeholders, our users, and the way we can maximize the collective goodness.

Lauren Long: I completely agree with what Maciej just said. There’s this urgency to creating and maintaining sustainable buildings. We really need to work together to eliminate data silos and challenges across different departments, but we also need to implement the technology we have and realize what technology we need so that we’re able to hit our goals. AI is a huge tool and a huge asset to have in our toolbox, and it can make reaching our global decarbonization goals possible.

Related Content

To learn more about sustainable smart buildings, listen to AI Innovations: The Foundation for Sustainable Buildings and read Mobile Access Control Promotes Sustainable Buildings and From Smart Buildings to Intelligent Ones. For the latest innovations from Nantum AI, follow them on X/Twitter at @nantumai and on LinkedIn. For the latest innovations from Blue Bolt by NTT, follow them on LinkedIn.

This article was edited by Erin Noble, copy editor.