The Newest Member of Your Facilities Team? Your Building.

Your building is talking to you. Artificial intelligence can help you listen.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way facilities operators gather key insights from their buildings and how quickly they can turn those insights into action. As AI evolves, facility managers are moving beyond dashboards and alerts to something more intuitive: the ability to “listen” to their buildings and gather new insights that drive stronger results.

In this Q&A, Jamie Cameron, vice president, OpenBlue at Johnson Controls, explains how AI is changing building management, why strong data infrastructure is essential and how facilities teams can begin to treat buildings as active members of the maintenance team.

What will change about the way AI is implemented in the built environment in 2026? What are the next steps for how it will transform building management?

In 2026, AI will touch every part of the building ecosystem, transforming how facilities operate. With 75% of facilities management professionals confident that AI will boost operational efficiency, momentum is undeniable. We’re already seeing tangible benefits—from faster commissioning times, to reduced energy consumption to better space optimization.

Most buildings generate enormous amounts of data, much of it underutilized. The next frontier is turning that data into reliable, actionable insights. Success depends on the right partners, organizations that can help extract, cleanse and contextualize data, fine-tune AI models, and ensure seamless integration across building systems.

When AI is implemented correctly, the results are measurable. For example, Standard Chartered Bank used AI-driven solutions to monitor more than 1,700 pieces of equipment across 25 locations—ultimately saving over $600,000 in annual energy costs.

What does it mean for AI to “listen to what a building is saying”? What will be the impact?

When we say that AI can “listen” to a building, we’re really talking about its ability to process and interpret data at a scale that humans simply cannot manage on their own. Buildings generate continuous streams of information across HVAC equipment, sensors, security cameras and more. AI can thoroughly analyze this data quickly to contextualize and translate it into clear, prioritized recommendations for facilities teams in conversational language. Moving things like equipment performance, energy consumption, occupancy trends, weather patterns and other external factors into simple to understand insights helps teams make better decisions faster, whether they’re planning maintenance, optimizing energy use or responding to issues before they escalate.

The next evolution is agentic AI, which uses data to achieve complex facility goals while addressing changing factors. By proactively and holistically evaluating facilities data, these agents have the potential to build on results that reduce maintenance costs by 25%, cut unplanned downtime by 70%, and increase equipment lifespan by 25-40%.

Why is it important for facilities teams to improve how they incorporate their data into their operations?

Good data is the backbone of strong AI solutions. When AI is paired with a wide range of historical data, it can gather the full context from a building that’s needed to reduce maintenance costs, streamline processes and adapt operations to changing environmental factors.

However, when facilities operators skip crucial steps in evaluating their data inputs, they can experience the consequences of poor data management such as hallucinations, siloed datasets with a lack of consistency across building subsystem formats, difficulty in integrating third-party applications and minimal insights gathered from raw data. Today, 63% of organizations lack the data management practices needed for successful AI projects. Pairing good practice with the right partner, who can help train the solution on your data, integrate with your existing tools and equipment, and advise your team, is critical to realizing the benefits of AI-powered facilities tools.

What can facilities maintenance teams do to prioritize their data infrastructure?

Buildings have vast amounts of untapped data already. The organizations that are turning that data into actionable insights are the ones who will win. Interoperability is the name of the game—facilities teams need to establish a unified system where data from different floors, rooms, equipment and systems can come together under one platform.

This requires facilities teams to integrate a scalable, secure ecosystem that uses edge, cloud and even other AI technologies to pull IT and OT data from across a building’s systems into one place. Achieving this is now easier than ever. The right AI solutions break down siloes to create a pipeline of standardized data in a singular format—enabling teams to benefit from fully contextualized data from a single source to guide automation and respond in real-time to buildings.

What does AI listening to a building look like in action? Do you have an example you can share?

The right tool with the right data can streamline operations, improve performance and cut costs—ultimately helping facilities teams focus on strategic work and freeing up capital to invest in other priorities. For example, one of the largest hospitality complexes on the Las Vegas Strip feeds data from nine chillers, nine cooling towers, five chilled water pumps, five condenser water pumps and four heat exchangers into an AI platform to drive more efficient operation and control. This resulted in $110,000 in annual energy savings while streamlining plant operations.

Ultimately, data infrastructure is more than just a key differentiator for building automation; it’s an essential component for teams as they tackle everyday challenges and long-term planning.