Become the building: Mission workshop

Our recent webinar brought together four industry pioneers to demonstrate how open standards, semantic data models and AI are breaking down information silos to create truly intelligent buildings that can communicate, optimize and verify their own performance. Building on our previous discussion about how people, machines, AI agents and buildings form new collaborative teams, this session explored the practical implementation of these concepts.

The panel:

Steven Lothrop, Electrical Engineer and Head of Smart Buildings at PAE

Kimon Onuma, FAIA, President of ONUMA, Inc. and Founder of BIMStorm (Moderator)

Tristan de Frondeville, Founder & CEO of SkyCentrics

Zahra Ghorbani, PhD, Senior Digital Design Manager at Massport

Watch the full Webinar

The challenge

Buildings today are drowning in disconnected data. Even award-winning smart buildings like PAE's Living Building in Portland have their intelligence trapped in silos: BIM models, building management systems, Excel schedules and PDF wiring diagrams that can't talk to each other.

Steven explained: "We have a beautiful BIM with all the equipment, but it's not interconnected, so you can't have that conversation."

The result? Missing information means no authoritative source. Teams waste time hunting for warranty data and installation dates, and AI tools provide wrong answers because they lack building context.

The solution: Knowledge graphs + open standards

The team demonstrated using Resource Description Framework (RDF) to create "knowledge graphs": interconnected webs of building information that AI can actually understand. By leveraging open standards like ASHRAE 223P, BRICK schema and Project Haystack, they've created a common language for buildings.

Kimon broke it down simply: "A knowledge graph is really the connectivity between systems. I am an air handling unit and I need electricity to run. I'm pushing air into this room."

These relationships create verifiable truth about the building—no guessing, just explicit connections showing how systems interact. The game-changer? Natural conversations with buildings through live AI chat that instantly shows equipment locations, connections and specifications.

Key breakthroughs

Decoding energy bills with AI: It took PAE's energy experts nearly a year to decode their own utility bill manually. With the knowledge graph, they instantly discovered that half their money went to demand charges, and their hot water heater was unexpectedly driving morning peak demand instead of just the air handling units.

The maturity framework: Zahra introduced a comprehensive assessment tool developed with NIST that scores digital twin systems across 22 dimensions, providing a roadmap for improvement.

Rapid innovation through open platforms: New applications were built in hours using standard APIs instead of months with proprietary systems. Tristan explained: "You don't have to wait for SkyCentrics to add a feature. Steven has already been working on an app communicating to the data."

Creating trusted AI agents: The system integrates documents (even handwritten notes on equipment), live telemetry and knowledge graphs without requiring one single schema. "You don't have to choose BRICK or Haystack. You have knowledge graphs of knowledge graphs," Tristan noted.

Key takeaways

The phone number principle: Just as international calling standards enable global communication, buildings need standardized IDs and data structures. Kimon's analogy: "My phone has a unique ID anyone can call worldwide. We're applying what already works to buildings."

Start with what you have: PAE transformed existing Revit models, system data and sensor information into 200,000+ semantic relationships connecting systems, spaces and equipment.

AI needs context: Without semantic models, AI makes wrong assumptions. With knowledge graphs, it provides accurate answers grounded in actual building data, even reading handwritten notes on equipment.

Open beats proprietary: The Coalition for Smarter Buildings approach ensures no vendor lock-in. As Tristan noted: "The explosion of innovation in IT because things were open standard is going to do the same thing for building operations."

The tools are here. As Kimon noted: "This literally happened within hours and days. In one week we had an amazing amount of data available."

Want to see these technologies in action? Join us at Greenbuild 2026 in New York, including the full-day AI Summit.