Become the Building: Creating Trusted Operational Communities with People, Machines, and AI

This is not a session where attendees simply watch a finished solution being presented. Participants will step into the roles of owners, occupants, operators, designers, engineers, technology providers, public agencies, building systems, and AI agents, and work together to explore how trusted operational intelligence is created through collaboration.
Participants will also experience how building intelligence is created, shared, and too often lost. As roles interact, they will see how design intent, engineering decisions, construction knowledge, operational experience, and occupant insights accumulate throughout a building's life. Rather than treating this intelligence as a byproduct of project deliverables, the session explores how it can become a sustainable resource that continues growing instead of being repeatedly recreated.
"Become the Building" is the living collaborative experience of the AI Summit and the culmination of a collaborative journey that begins months before Greenbuild. Starting in August, a series of public webinars, workshops, and mission-based exercises invite participants from across the industry to explore operational challenges, contribute ideas, test approaches, and help build the evolving knowledge model. Rather than starting from scratch at the conference, Greenbuild participants step into a living operational community that has already begun learning together.
At Greenbuild, participants join that continuing journey by interacting with presenters, previous mission participants, and one another. Results and lessons from the pre-Greenbuild missions become part of the live experience, while new audience contributions immediately extend the shared building intelligence and help shape future missions.
Using the PAE Living Building as the common reference environment, participants interact with presenters, previous mission participants, and one another. Results and lessons from the pre-Greenbuild missions become part of the live experience, while new audience contributions immediately extend the shared building intelligence and help shape future missions.
Every participant contributes a different perspective, demonstrating that no single discipline, software platform, or AI system possesses all of a building's intelligence or can preserve it alone. It emerges through connected communities working together over time.
Unlike a traditional conference session, Become the Building is one chapter in a larger collaborative effort that begins before Greenbuild, expands through live participation during the Summit, and continues afterward as the community preserves and improves building intelligence together.
The experience is organized around the Five Principles of Trusted Operational Intelligence: Identity, Context, Trust, Continuity, and Improvement, which provide a common framework for connecting people, operational systems, digital twins, AI, and organizational decision-making without prescribing a single platform or technology. These principles provide practical guidance for preserving and continuously improving building intelligence as organizations, software, staff, vendors, and AI continue to evolve.
Presented by Zahra Ghorbani, Stephen Lothrop, Tristan de Frondeville, and Kimon Onuma. The session demonstrates that building intelligence is created by people long before AI arrives. Technology helps capture, preserve, connect, validate, and apply that intelligence, but it does not replace the experience, intent, and judgment that create it.
The missions continue throughout the Summit and beyond. Contributions from the pre-Greenbuild workshops, live sessions, and post-event activities become part of the evolving Living BIMStorm, demonstrating that building intelligence grows through continuous participation rather than a single event.
Participants won't just learn about building intelligence—they'll help create it, preserve it, and contribute it to a living body of knowledge that continues growing long after the Summit concludes.