The Next Sustainable Resources: Trusted Operational Intelligence

What will it take for AI to make better building decisions instead of simply recreating knowledge we already have?
This opening keynote frames AI as a shared capability for the entire building community, not simply another application or a tool for technology specialists. A brief audience interaction introduces the idea that useful building intelligence depends on the combined knowledge of many people, disciplines, and systems. This sets the stage for the Summit’s broader examination of how that intelligence can be connected, trusted, and sustained over time.
Steve Jones will establish why this question matters now. Drawing on decades of industry research, including the widely referenced SmartMarket Reports, he will examine the gap between the building industry’s accelerating AI ambitions and its readiness to support them. Fragmented workflows, inconsistent project handovers, disconnected applications, and the continued loss of building intelligence prevent information from moving reliably from planning and design through construction, operations, and ownership.
Drummond Reed will then explore the trust foundation required to move from connected buildings to trusted operational intelligence. Drawing on his work in decentralized trust at the Linux Foundation, he will show how smart buildings function as verifiable trust communities, where people, organizations, devices, and AI agents must continuously establish trusted relationships before information and decisions can be relied upon.
As moderator, Kimon Onuma will connect these perspectives to the broader AI Summit theme. He will frame building intelligence as a sustainable resource that begins with design intent and grows throughout the building lifecycle. By connecting industry trends with trusted operational communities, he will introduce the central challenge for the day: how to preserve, connect, and continuously improve building intelligence rather than repeatedly recreating it.
Together, the speakers introduce Trusted Operational Intelligence: building knowledge with sufficient identity, context, provenance, responsibility, continuity, and trust to support decisions made by both people and AI.
Yet intelligence itself has rarely been treated as a resource worth preserving. Every building begins accumulating intelligence the moment it is conceived, yet few organizations preserve it as deliberately as they preserve energy, water, materials, or carbon. Architects contribute purpose, intent, assumptions, and design decisions. Engineers, builders, owners, operators, occupants, and technology providers add new layers of knowledge throughout the building's life. Over time, our industry has largely evolved contracts and deliverables around document artifacts, drawings, specifications, reports, and models, rather than preserving the intelligence behind them. The result is that organizations repeatedly rediscover knowledge they have already paid to create.
For more than three decades, the green building movement has challenged us to reduce the waste of energy, water, materials, and carbon.
The AI era presents another sustainability challenge: the waste of intelligence. Every time intelligence is lost, organizations spend additional time, money, and effort rediscovering what was already known. As AI becomes embedded in the built environment, it will depend on the intelligence we choose to preserve, not just the documents we leave behind.
Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of why AI-ready buildings require more than technology, and how trusted, preserved, and continually improved building intelligence can become the foundation for sustainable decisions throughout the building lifecycle.
If intelligence is one of a building's most valuable resources, why do we keep throwing it away?