Owner Leadership in the AI Era: From Trusted Intelligence to Market Action

As the Summit’s closing forum, this session brings owners from transportation infrastructure, higher education, and healthcare together to define what the market must deliver next. Participants will hear how major owner organizations are preparing for AI, where their priorities differ, and which requirements for trusted operational intelligence remain remarkably consistent across sectors.
This closing forum brings together owner leaders to answer the central question raised throughout the AI Summit: How do we preserve building intelligence as a trusted, long-term organizational asset? Building on the keynote and the Become the Building collaborative experience, owners will discuss how procurement, governance, and operational leadership can transform building intelligence from fragmented project information into a sustainable resource that continues creating value throughout the building lifecycle.
Owners ultimately decide what information must be delivered, preserved, governed, and carried forward throughout the building lifecycle. As AI accelerates across the built environment, owner leadership will increasingly determine whether building intelligence remains fragmented across disconnected systems or becomes a trusted organizational asset that continues creating value for decades.
The forum challenges the industry to move beyond technology demonstrations and establish the conditions under which AI-enabled building intelligence can deliver meaningful sustainability, resilience, operational performance, and long-term owner value. Owners will articulate what they need from architects, engineers, contractors, technology providers, standards organizations, educators, and policymakers, turning those expectations into a call to action for the broader industry.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating across the built environment, but its greatest opportunity is not simply automating today's workflows. It is helping preserve, connect, govern, and continuously improve the building intelligence created throughout a facility's lifecycle.
For decades, owners have inherited fragmented information spread across BIM models, GIS, building automation systems, CMMS platforms, PDFs, spreadsheets, and proprietary applications. AI did not create this fragmentation; it inherited it. As organizations begin deploying AI agents across these disconnected systems, owners face a more fundamental question than which AI platform they should use: What building intelligence must persist across every project, every application, every organization, every generation of staff, and every AI model?
Bringing together leaders from three very different owner organizations, the forum explores the common challenges emerging across their sectors. While each organization has unique operational priorities, they increasingly share the same strategic questions:
How do we establish trusted operational intelligence?
What information should owners require throughout the building lifecycle?
How can AI be trusted to support decisions?
What should architects, engineers, contractors, technology providers, and standards organizations deliver to make that possible?
Throughout the Summit, participants will explore these questions from three complementary perspectives. The keynote establishes why building intelligence is a sustainable resource. Become the Building demonstrates how it is created, connected, and preserved through trusted operational communities. This closing forum asks how owners can turn those ideas into procurement requirements, governance practices, and market expectations.
Rather than a series of presentations, the forum is organized around a common set of questions developed throughout the Summit. These questions draw directly from participant discussions, polls, and collaborative missions, allowing owners to respond to the ideas the audience has already explored.
This closing forum brings those perspectives together. Rather than asking how AI can make today’s fragmented processes faster, the discussion asks how the industry can build a shared operational understanding that survives every project handoff and enables trusted intelligence over the life of a building. Moving beyond technology demonstrations, the panel will identify the market conditions required for AI to create lasting value.
Each panelist answers the same three questions:
What building intelligence should never be lost?
What will your organization begin requiring?
What should the industry deliver next?
Moderated by Mike Bordenaro of the Asset Leadership Network, the discussion features owner perspectives from Luciana Burdi of Massport, John Messner of Penn State University, and Seydina Fall of Johns Hopkins University. Representing transportation infrastructure, higher education, and healthcare, these leaders will illustrate how their organizations differ in mission, scale, and technology maturity, and where their underlying needs align.
The session concludes with a commitment round in which panelists identify one market priority, one industry expectation, and one near-term action that participants can take after Greenbuild to advance trusted operational intelligence.