PODCAST

Christina Cardoza: Hello and welcome to “insight.tech Talk,” formerly known as “IoT Chat” but with the same high-quality conversations around Internet of Things, technology trends, and the latest innovations you’ve come to know and love. I’m your host, Christina Cardoza, Editorial Director of insight.tech. And today I’m joined by two special guests to talk about this idea of smart and sustainable buildings.

But as always before we get started, let’s get to know our guests. Lauren from Nantum AI, I’ll start with you. What can you tell us about yourself and the company?

Lauren Long: Thank you for having me here today. It’s a pleasure to talk to you all. So I am Lauren. I’m the VP of Brand and Marketing at Nantum AI, formerly known as Prescriptive Data. We are the creator of the award-winning platform called Nantum. I’ve been in the CRE space for about 15 years now, mostly working at data-driven companies but also on the media side.

And at Nantum AI we empower buildings with actionable building insights. So we focus on saving energy, reducing carbon emissions, and lowering costs without sacrificing any occupant health or comfort. And we also help buildings hit their energy targets through real-time and prescriptive data as well as intelligent recommendations. We’re based out of New York. I’m actually outside of DC. But that’s pretty much us in a nutshell.

Christina Cardoza: Great. Looking forward to getting into how AI and data insights are helping move along this idea of sustainable buildings. But before we get there, I’d like to also introduce Maciej from Blue Bolt. What can you tell us about yourself and your company?

Maciej Labuszewski: Hi, Christina. Also, thank you for the chance to be here today. Like you said, my name is Maciej Labuszewski. I’m a Customer Success Specialist over at Blue Bolt. We are a European-based company offering a versatile tenant-experience app and dedicated self-assembled hardware. Our system combines contactless access within a building’s common areas via mobile app; a reservation panel that allows for bookings and tracking of all key building resources, such as parking spots, meeting rooms, desks; and most importantly for our topic today, a plethora of both short- and long-term solutions that help building owners develop their sustainability strategy.

And as for my role in the company, it is to cooperate with our principal stakeholders—so property owners, managers, tenants—in learning their needs, which are always unique for each type of building, and leading Blue Bolt’s implementation process so that our technology can best address those needs and translate into tangible everyday advantages.

Christina Cardoza: Absolutely. And the reason why I wanted to have this conversation on the podcast today is I feel like 2023, we had a lot of companies more focused on sustainability. They have a lot of corporate goals, a lot of legislations and regulations that they have to meet, as well as this idea of climate change to really make more sustainable operations and transform the way that they’re doing things.

So I wanted to have this conversation because I heard an astronomical number about the amount that buildings are actually contributing to some of these issues that we’re having. So Lauren, I want to start the conversation there. If you can talk about, with this urgent need to mitigate climate change, what is the role of buildings that they play to solving this problem?

Lauren Long: Yeah. So the built world is said to be responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions, and 28% of that is from operational processes—so, everything that it takes to make a building comfortable and healthy and operate as it should. That’s something that we focus on at Nantum AI, is bringing together all the data from HVAC and other building systems and integrating it with other real-time data—like occupancy or people counting; as well as third-party data, including water, gas, electrical demand among others.

So, back to your point about that number, even if we made building operations 50% more efficient than currently, then that would decrease global emissions by 14% alone, and that’s a pretty sizable impact. And since today 90% of our lives are inside buildings and climate change can radicalize weather for the future, we’re likely going to spend more time in buildings in the future.

So buildings have a unique responsibility to create these healthy and comfortable environments for us today and tomorrow, and it’s going to evolve. The needs for how those buildings make these environments comfortable are going to change as the outside environment changes too. So while buildings are definitely part of the problem, they also have a unique ability to be part of the solution and kind of be a role model for other industries.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, that’s great, and especially a problem that we want to start tackling now that everybody has been working from home. But there’s a push to get back into the offices, so a lot more people are going to be occupying these buildings. So, definitely a priority that we need to focus on now. And when we think about these buildings, it’s not just the buildings themselves. These are large buildings, and there’s multiple different businesses within those buildings. There’s the building owners, there’s managers of business, there’s the business owners.

So Maciej, I’m curious, from your perspective—because you do a lot around the building owners and the managers there—what are their goals when it comes to sustainability? And what do they need to be focused on to really make a dent in these efforts?

Maciej Labuszewski: So, undeniably in recent years a lot has been done in the areas such as recyclable construction materials and streamlining building processes to improve the real estate market. But, at the same time, there has been a shift in the focus when discussing how a building can not only be built sustainably but also exploited in this manner throughout its lifetime. And we have to remember that with more and more aging properties accumulating on the market with each year and tenant expectations continuing to rise, achieving this net-zero goal and decreasing the carbon and plastic footprint is an absolute necessity to extend the lifetime of buildings that will simply be considered obsolete very soon. And this is also actively signaled by the tenants, who are prioritizing environmentally conscious brands over those who put the environmental strategy aside.

So, in practice, there are two vectors that building owners sort of focus on. The first is to reduce inefficiencies arising from the use of old systems and incorrect assumptions on the patterns of heating, light, air conditioning—all basic resources such as those. But the incorrect assumptions also often stem from a lack of data. This data could help identify targets, set performance indicators, pinpoint unnecessary costs. But when it is not available, it becomes essentially impossible to formulate a strategy, let alone implement it successfully.

And the second vector is the attempt to engage tenants in changing their own consumption patterns and launching incentives from the bottom up for the creation of an environmentally responsible community in the building. However, in a building with many diverse tenants of course this is a very difficult task, since it requires appropriate communications, appropriate rewards, and of course the time for it to come into effect.

So Blue Bolt addresses these issues by considering sustainability factors as integral to every capability that we provide to a building. No matter how extensive the level of implementation is, the client can always enjoy the benefits of a more sustainable building. For example, switching from plastic cards and remote controls—which are the classic access-control tools—to access fully stored on a mobile phone. It’s an important step to becoming plastic-free in the building. And in a big office building this plastic consumption just on access cards can amount to almost 200 kilos per year.

Another example is the booking history on our resource booking panel, which can be viewed and analyzed by building administration to make adjustments in real time and adjust the availability of other resources as well.

Christina Cardoza: It sounds like not only do these buildings have to be sustainable, but they also have to be smart, which I talked about in the introduction here. And a couple things come to mind. Because you mentioned using a mobile phone, I assume that the building needs to have adequate network services in order for people to use their mobile phone for access. And then the resource booking—that involves some software and some technology to process to be able to give accurate results and get all that data and see those bookings.

So, Maciej, I’m curious, because things are always changing, what have been the recent technological innovations that are making all of these things that we just talked about possible? And then with those innovations, what is the expectation, not only from the building owners, but from the employees and the consumers to bring some of these into the building?

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 anymore on the property market. A few years ago this market was only just realizing the potential of introducing PropTech Solutions to the common areas of a building, instead mostly choosing to focus on the smart home apps. Now the market has become quite saturated with the former.

But many of those mobile solutions only deliver functionalities that are tailored to certain, very narrow, isolated problems and target very specific property portfolios. And therefore they simply lack the scope and scale to accommodate the needs of the owner, the administration, the tenants, all the end users, the actual people who reside in the building.

And because of that building managers now have their sights set on all the complex solutions, the ones that can deliver measurable results and ones that have universal capabilities across the entire portfolio. Something they value a lot is a product that ensures uniform ESG, guest management, and the resource aspect at a similar standard or the same standard in all locations, where users have the same interface that is easily navigable, that doesn’t require a lot of time to switch from all those traditional methods that I mentioned earlier—so the cards and remote controls.

And a strong focus is also placed on the cost-effectiveness of the solution, and rapid implementation so that the results can be felt immediately. And this is something that Blue Bolt excels in, because our system employs hardware with excellent flexibility and adaptability that allows us to install essentially on any building and deploy the entire system within a few days.

So, the ability to integrate with all the various access control, parking, elevator systems, in addition to sensors installed in the building itself—all this can be completed within just days, no matter how old the building is. Which ties to my previous point about this pile of aging property that keeps accumulating. So the system is deployable whether in residential, office, logistical, commercial properties—this makes no difference for us, and it’s this universality that truly led to our success so far.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, that’s a great point that you make about older buildings, because of course newer buildings have the advantage of being able to implement all of this technology in the beginning. But it’s good to know that we can utilize some existing infrastructure, and we can still make some of these things happen in the existing buildings and older buildings that we have, which are part of the problem.

You mentioned there’s also been a problem with lack of data that has made business owners struggle to make some of these things happen. But all of these things we’re talking about, as these things come online, I think we have then the problem of too much data or what to do with that data. How do we really see those consumption patterns? How do we get insight? How do we derive value that is going to make us be able to have actionable insight and actionable decision making?

So, Lauren, I’m curious because, since you do a lot of work with AI, how AI can help create these insights, show us how the building is performing, and then make efforts there?

Lauren Long: Yeah. So, AI is definitely a tool to help us reach our goals using the different types of data. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can consolidate data into a unified user interface and then dig into that data to find patterns, correlations, or causational relationships between different types of data. And it takes a lot less time than it would for a human to do so.

And, like you said, there’s so much data, so it’s almost impossible to try to keep tabs on everything as a human. You would need an entire team to do that. And there’s still the human element or error that can happen there. So when AI does this on a repeatable basis, AI is the only way to make it scalable.

But where we are in the industry using all of this information is really unique. I often recommend the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. And I normally do that 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. So, in building operations there are sustainability managers, and they’re the goal-setters of the group. They collaborate to set goals, find solutions, and track progress around building sustainability. But there’s also the asset managers, who are the cost-optimizers. They analyze, invest in, and manage real estate for long-term value and sustainability. But then there’s the third group, and these are the building operators, who are the change-makers. They maintain efficient operations and optimize building performance for sustainability. So the chasm I talked about is between the first two groups and the building operators, where there isn’t any real-time performance data.

So, why am I talking about all this? Because AI has the ability to create real-time accountability. And that’s something Nantum AI does with our daily AI engineering recommendations and also our compliance analysis, where we’re able to assess the number of recommendations that our system sent to these engineers, and the number that were actually acted upon, and then the resulting success of that.

But there’s also—AI can assist in fault detection, where you can discover that the building isn’t actually running to its full savings potential. So, like you said, there’s so much data and there’s so much insight that you can derive from those. But without actually using the data, what’s the point? So using AI to make actionable insights is really important.

Christina Cardoza: I love how you described the building owners or the building operators as the change-makers, because I think that’s very powerful. They are the ones that have the ability to make these changes. And I think not only in addition to all of the data being overwhelming, all the changes that they can make are a little overwhelming, and they might not know where to start. We’re talking about heating, lighting, occupancy, mobile networks—all of these different things.

So I’m curious, Lauren, if you can talk a little bit more about what a sustainable building actually looks like. What are the things that they should be focused on? And is there one thing that they should start and then grow? Or is it happening everything at once? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Lauren Long: Yeah, sure. So, there’s a saying that everyone uses that says “Every building is a snowflake.” And that phrase is used so much that it’s no longer a snowflake—it’s very common. But every building is different, from construction—including when it was built, the style it was made in, materials that were used, the climate it’s in. So it’s hard to say that there’s—I mean, there is no one answer to what sustainability looks like for a building.

But to that point, 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, which is super easy to do with sensor integration these days. You use low-flush toilets, well seal your windows, use revolving doors, the outside. There’s many things that you can do on that sort of a 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. Sustainable buildings use technology, and they’re smarter than the average building because of the data they’re collecting and hopefully acting on. You can’t improve without a baseline, so it’s important to understand what’s happening today and make an improvement plan so that you can become better. And that’s the only way to do it. This extends to space utilization and making spaces more comfortable and ready to support productivity for occupants.

But I also want to talk about a report from Deloitte that came out this year called the “2024 Real Estate Outlook Survey.” In the report, they say that only 5% of buildings are fully modernized, which mean they have core systems that are easy to incorporate emerging digital technologies. So that’s only 5% of all buildings, which doesn’t help us really address that 40% number of carbon emissions that we’re trying to go after.

However, the report also says that 34% are mostly converted to these modernized systems, and 30% are currently transitioning from legacy models. So as these buildings continue to move towards modernization, the 5% will become more like a 40%, and building sustainability targets will be easier to hit. So as these sensors feed into the building systems and give operators more data, change can actually happen.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, that’s great. It sounds like there are a lot of things that building owners and operators can be doing, and a lot of technology or sensors that they can be adding to be making a dent in some of these goals.

But one thing I want to talk about, Maciej, and I’ll point this question to you, is I know a lot of businesses when they are adopting a new technology or they’re working with a partner or company, there’s that fear that they’re going to have that vendor lock-in or that they’re not going to be able to future-proof their investments. They want to make sure that they can continue to scale, continue to innovate. Because I think, even if you just look at AI, the world is changing every day, every week, every year, so we want to make sure we can stay on top of it.

So what would you recommend for building owners? How can they avoid some of those challenges or issues that they have and make sure that they can scale in the future?

Maciej Labuszewski: Some of the fears, the main fears that building owners face when it comes to making this big decision—whether we should invest, innovate, try a new product—it’s a fear of the change bringing more chaos into the process than the benefits that carries with it. And that pertains to both the process itself and the product that’s being evaluated.

And within the business environment that Blue Bolt revolves in, we most often notice this dependency on existing technology in terms of access-control systems. Many property owners are absolutely aware, they are fully conscious, that their existing systems do not offer a satisfactory level of user experience, but they believe that changing to another system will be synonymous with installation works that drag on forever, create problems for tenants, and, in the end, do not contribute in any way directly to improving the sustainability metrics of a building.

So when they encounter Blue Bolt, they’re quite often surprised that a superior level of comfort and security is available with so little effort and, importantly, on average with 60% lower costs, which is very important to those asset managers or building owners who are working on tight budgets. Additionally, there’s also a question of the wiring and cabling that the hardware requires, which is minimal in our case. Whereas with some of our traditional competitors this process can literally last for several months.

Christina Cardoza: So do you have any customer examples that you can share with us of how Blue Bolt came in, how you guys were able to streamline those changes, put them on a path to innovation, and really help existing build building owners make changes?

Maciej Labuszewski: Actually, one of our very first clients is a co-working space brand and the owner of commercial real estate with offices located in five countries. So at first they decided to launch Blue Bolt in just one out of seven locations, here in Warsaw, Poland. But the ease of access and the modernity that a simple building app brought to the entire building made them actually extend the cooperation, first onto all buildings in Poland and then allowing us to expand into the other four countries where they exist.

Some of the features that really caught their attention and that proved really successful was switching off elevators during off-peak hours. This is actually something that’s helped by our AI system that aggregates the data from both 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 straight from their phone or from their computer. And this is what guarantees that we are not just another gadget but a tool that helps make informed decisions on a daily basis.

And another example that I would give is one of the largest property holdings in central Eastern Europe, with a portfolio of almost 20 buildings in Poland alone, who wanted to solve several key problems—one of them being the need for building guests to drive around the building and find a parking spot because they couldn’t access the underground garage. So with our data analytics we were able to learn—first of all to provide access through the mobile-access part of our solution, and then learn from the patterns of occupancy when a certain amount of spaces should be left free how the building management can optimize their processes. And furthermore, by ordering their integration of Blue Bolt with their external sensors within the offices, the client was always up to date with data on reducing wastage—the factors I mentioned before, so, lighting, heating, air conditioning, HVAC, and so on.

Christina Cardoza: Those are a great example of how businesses and building owners, they can make changes. Change doesn’t have to be hard. If you partner with the right partner, like Blue Bolt, they can help you implement some of these things and make it a lot smoother.

So, since you got to talk about your sweet spot, I want to hear about Nantum AI’s sweet spot; if you guys have any customer examples or use cases that you can provide—how you helped, where you came in, and where really Nantum AI works best.

Lauren Long: Sure. So, one of our favorite focal points is to help companies meet their energy-conservation measures, or widely known as ECMs. One of our customers is Jamestown Properties, and they have the Waterfront Plaza in San Francisco, California. And they wanted to generate savings using a smart shutdown—or smart startup, smart shutdown, and midday ramps during the day. So, that would be changing the building system’s operation based on real-time occupancy.

And this year they released a report about the accomplishments of using Nantum AI within their properties, and against a 2019 baseline they have saved over $71,000 and almost 285,000 kilowatts of energy. That’s really great tangible information to have about just that small change of building operations can make a difference.

And I’d also like to share the US General Services Administration’s (or GSA’s) Green Proving Ground report. It was done in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Labs, and they completed a large pilot study on energy-management-information systems and automated system optimization—and they call this EMIS and ASO—the government and acronyms, you know; it’s a thing.

But the report concluded that using these systems, Nantum AI, they can result in 5%–11% whole building savings, which is pretty significant. And that by automating the government’s real estate operations they could save the federal government $28.7 million in energy costs a year, while also significantly reducing carbon emissions.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, thanks for sharing those numbers. Because it’s one thing just to talk about it, but when you actually see the numbers and the impact that it can have, it makes it a little bit more powerful and makes these initiatives that we’re working towards something greater.

So I’m curious, though, because you mentioned that partnership, but we’re talking about a lot of different technologies and sensors and software and hardware that go into doing some of these things and making those use cases successful for your customers. I’m curious, are there any technology partnerships that you guys used to make some of this happen?

Lauren Long: We focus mostly on the software aspect of what we do today. And we partner with a lot of companies who have access to accurate and precise data. And the best way to get that is often through API integration. And, you know, the better data in, the better data out, right?

So there’s definitely that component of our partnerships, but we also rely heavily on hardware. At Nantum AI, I believe that every building could become a smart building. And we have found that buildings that are powered by Intel chips have the most capacity to become smart. So all of our buildings operate on an Intel Gateway, and this combination kind of makes us a perfect partner with Intel. Our goal is to become the smarter-building provider for every building in the world, which is made possible and powered by Intel.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, that’s great to hear. Obviously, insight.tech and the insight.tech Talk, we are sponsored by Intel. But I think what’s great about using Intel chips—and even they have the AI toolkits—is that they’re always updating based on the innovations and the trends that they see are happening. So we talked about vendor lock-in, we talked about being able to scale and being able to innovate—they’re making sure that that’s all happening. So it’s great to see that you guys are partnering with them.

We are running out of time. I know we could probably talk about this space for another hour or so. We’ve only scratched the surface. But before we go, I want to throw it back to each of you guys, if there’s any final thoughts or final takeaways that you want to leave our listeners with. This is such a big topic, so if there’s anything that you think that they should get out of this conversation or that they should start doing to make some of these goals. Maciej, I’ll start with you.

Maciej Labuszewski: So, we’ve been talking about technology, but something very important to mention in context of this entire wide topic of sustainability and attaining net-zero goals is that it must be used to also unite people over a common goal. At points we are talking about something that isn’t just a business decision but also an ethical decision, and a decision that may impact the collective future. Delivering the solutions that we are working on here in 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, when thinking about the needs of our users, and the way we can maximize the collective goodness, I suppose, if you can call it that, of our solution and the change that it brings into the world.

Christina Cardoza: Great. Anything from you, Lauren?

Lauren Long: I completely agree with what you just said. And it’s this urgency in creating and maintaining sustainable buildings has never been stronger. Climate is not improving, and 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 that we can have in our toolbox, and it can make reaching our global decarbonization goals possible.

Christina Cardoza: Well, I just want thank you both again for joining the podcast. It’s been a great conversation seeing how data can really help make buildings more sustainable and smarter. It’s not just about turning off the lights. You need access to data, you need AI so you can get some of these insights, you can uncover some of these patterns, and start making changes today to better tomorrow. So this has been a great conversation. Thank you guys again.

I invite all of our listeners, please go to the Nantum AI and the Blue Bolt websites to see how they can help you start making some changes and start reaching your goals. As well as follow us on insight.tech. We’ll continue to cover these partners as well as other partners in this space, keep you up to date of all the latest and greatest happening. So until next time, this has been “insight.tech Talk.”

The preceding transcript is provided to ensure accessibility and is intended to accurately capture an informal conversation. The transcript may contain improper uses of trademarked terms and as such should not be used for any other purposes. For more information, please see the Intel^® trademark information.

This transcript was edited by Erin Noble, copy editor.