Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments

Who should AI trust? Earlier this year, I met Drummond Reed at the KWAAI conference at Scale 23x , where he was presenting on decentralized trust. I asked him a question: Could decentralized trust apply to buildings? It wasn’t a use case he had been thinking about. As we talked through people, devices, AI agents, building systems, first responders, owners, operators, and digital twins, something c...

You are currently renting your own intelligence. And Big Tech is making you pay for the privilege. Every time you use a centralized AI, your data is vacuumed up by a few giants, accelerating a dangerous consolidation of power. But there is an even bigger physical threat: energy. If Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) requires centralizing computing in massive server farms, it will concentrate ma...

A lack of documentation almost cost Peter Lasensky, founder of Command Post, $20 million. His response? He invented a simple, contemporaneous documentation tool using a Nextel walkie-talkie in 2001. Hear his 30-year journey from being one of San Diego's largest builders to creating Command Post Rev Ops and the Daily Report App—tools that manage the business of construction and have helped cust...

Then why can’t you keep ice cream at the right temperature? Everyone imagines ice cream melting , but the real operational killer is often the opposite: the freezer goes too cold , product gets freezer burn, and inventory is lost. This episode is a field note as I prep to fly to AHR in Vegas — reflecting on a week where we proved something important with Facil.ai + Onuma : Smart buildings are not...

Cross-Pollinating AutomatedBuildings: Mentorship & Bumblebees After more than five decades in the building automation industry, Ken Sinclair has seen it all, from brass pneumatic thermostats and refrigerator-sized computers to cloud platforms, digital twins, and AI. As the founder of AutomatedBuildings.com and a fixture at AHR for nearly 30 years, Ken’s real superpower isn’t prediction; it’s c...

Data Sharing, IP, and the Future of Buildings John Turner brings decades of hard-earned experience across major global organizations, working from the owner side, leading digital transformation, and pushing real-world BIM and digital twin strategies at scale. In this Café Zai session, John Turner and I talk about what’s holding the industry back: siloed thinking, IP fear, and “hill protection.” We...

Because the real world hasn’t fully come to the table yet. At NeurIPS Urban AI, I spoke with Fabian Raisch (TU Rosenheim/TU Munich), whose research targets scalable AI-based building control with significant potential: improving efficiency by 10–50%, depending on building conditions and systems. Fabian shared the most important transition happening right now: his team has been working in the ideal...

In this Café ZAi conversation, Kimon Onuma speaks with Zheng (Thomas) Tang from NVIDIA about how synthetic data, computer vision, and digital twins are teaching AI to understand buildings, warehouses, and cities. The discussion explores “outside-in” safety, multi-camera perception, and why seeing environments accurately is foundational to the future of urban AI.

Donna Vakalis, a postdoc researcher at Mila, Quebec AI Institute, focuses on reducing climate emissions from buildings using AI. Her work involves optimizing HVAC systems without extensive data, employing data-efficient reinforcement learning. Vakalis' research aims to create agents that can control building systems effectively from day one, even without prior experience in the specific building....

A Columbia robotics researcher and a Google AI engineer join Café Zai to ask why our buildings, giant robots in disguise, are still asleep. About the Guest: Judah Goldfeder is a researcher at Columbia University’s robotics and dynamic systems lab and an AI researcher at Google, where he works on reinforcement learning for real buildings. He bridges two worlds—cutting-edge AI research and the messy...

Kimon Onuma and Cyril Verley trade confessions from decades inside the BIM and digital twin world. From hoarding data and chasing flashy visuals to selling LOD 500 models that nobody could use, they name the “Seven Deadly BIMs” and discuss how the industry can find redemption through open data, APIs, and collaboration. This episode of Café Zai invites listeners to reflect, and rethink how architec...

Join Kimon Onuma as he takes you behind the scenes of the US Green Building Council's 2025 LA Conference, where sustainability meets cutting-edge technology. In this episode, Kimon shares his insights from a day packed with innovative discussions about AI, green design, and the future of architecture. Dive into a world where building certification goes beyond simple checklists, exploring how L...

AI and Standards. Real-time Café Zai reflections from Day 1 at Greenbuild 2025. Kimon Onuma pushes back on the corporate sustainability script and narrative, and calls out architects for hiding behind PDFs and being afraid to share their secret sauce with AI. An unfiltered Café Zai update straight from the conference floor. Stay tuned for a new post from day 2 of our presentation at 2:15 in room 4...

Reanimating buildings with living, owner-run data. Kimon Onuma and Cyril Verley crack open why “living” planning beats glossy shelfware master plans. Fresh from Tradeline, they map how to turn a static master plan into an owner-run data product: across assets/spaces/projects, you can actually query. They lay out a simple governance cadence, explain how to rewrite RFPs (“No Dead Data”), and share r...

Data is changing real estate. Amy Polvado breaks down the density story—capital, energy, and intelligence—inside today’s data centers. We unpack why “dollars not square feet” matters, how higher rack power reshapes sites, where cooling and water go, and why handovers still miss critical information. We close on owner exposure and duty of care: accessibility, safety, and giving responders the data...

When a building is completed, it often stops talking to us. All the knowledge, intelligence, and memory that shaped it disappear into the walls. In this Café Zai conversation, Kimon Onuma and Chikara Inamura, Director of Digital Technology at CO Architects, explore what it means for a building to have a soul in the digital age.  We discuss why architectural education is “broken,” how information h...

Café Zai with Fire Chief Victor Esch : Other Café Zai podcasts have focused on how we design, construct, and operate facilities and assets. My conversation with Victor Esch is about what happens when those facilities are on fire. Firefighters are asked to risk their lives to save others, but too often they go in blind. Critical building information exists in “smart” systems, yet remains locked awa...

AI is reshaping the built environment, and it demands structured, open data. In this Café Zai episode, Kimon Onuma meets with BuildingSmart USA industry leaders to explore how decades of buildingSMART standards are now becoming the fuel for both humans and machines . opnBIM standards are now have one of the best use cases for AI-driven innovation, helping buildings finally get smarter. Guests: Cal...

Kimon Onuma and Cyril Verley trace the evolution of architecture’s digital journey, from hand drafting, to early CAD experiments, to the rise of BIM and Revit. Cyril shares firsthand stories from Skidmore, Goody Clancy, Autodesk, and HOK, where clash detection became BIM’s first killer app, saving thousands of dollars per conflict. Together, they unpack how beautiful models often bury critical dat...

Most owners are still trying to manage their facilities and assets with static PDFs and mutating Excel files, like calling an Uber by downloading a spreadsheet of cars. From projects to existing buildings to business plans, the result is a virus that mutates into a plague: endless rework, wasted resources, and consultants paid to treat the symptoms over and over. In this Café Zai session with the...

I asked Jack Dangermond for 5 minutes… he gave me 52. In this uncut extended Café Zai conversation, recorded live at ESRI HQ during the buildingSMART USA 2025 event, Jack shares his candid thoughts on: Why collaboration happens at the speed of trust How GIS and BIM are converging into a true system of systems Why AI is a ‘miracle drug’ for design and intelligence His vision of a Living Atlas, a ne...

Silos are the clogged arteries of your buildings. Time to change the diet. If you only feed your buildings and assets donuts, don’t be surprised when they get sick. In this Café Zai conversation, Michael Bordenaro of the Asset Leadership Network recalls Jack Dempsey’s observation: “Asset management is actually pretty easy… except for the people. People don’t like eating their green beans.” For yea...

Cameron Christensen grew up with a front-row seat to pioneering work in facility asset management. His father, Doug Christensen, literally wrote the book on Total Cost of Ownership — Building Total Enterprise Asset Management Solutions — and famously said: “Buildings… the gift that keeps on taking.” In this first clip from our Café Zai conversation, Cameron shares how that legacy shaped his career...

New Café ZAi Episode, with Birgitta Foster That new building smell? It fades. Then it starts to smell like budget gaps, moldy ductwork, outdated spreadsheets……and the LEED Platinum plaque still gleaming on the wall. Welcome to the post-ribbon-cutting reality, where sustainability goals crash into aging systems, talent loss, and siloed data. Or as we like to say: it’s a classic #PainInTheGlass. I s...

We’ve been making the same mistakes for decades. Jack Dempsey isn’t afraid to say it, and in this 3-minute clip from our Café Zai conversation, he breaks down why the system is designed to fail, not just in federal facilities, but across the entire built environment. I set it up by pointing out what many of us know: Agencies, GAO, Congress, this isn’t partisan. No one has gotten it right. The will...