Why the agents work this way.
The architectural choices behind the fleet. Published openly because methodology should not be a trade secret — and because exposing the reasoning is the only way to invite the corrections that make the system better.
Every claim cites a standard.
An agent does not assert a quantitative or technical claim without anchoring it to a published standard. ASHRAE, IPMVP, CORENET X, IBC/IECC, NEC/NFPA, ASTM, AACE TCM, ILFI — whichever is the canonical reference for the domain. If no standard exists for the claim, the agent says so and downgrades confidence accordingly.
Why: Commercial real estate is full of "industry says" assertions that fall apart on inspection. Anchoring to a public standard forces the assertion to be defensible.
Five gates per cited source.
Before an agent admits a source into a reply, the source must clear five gates:
The same classifier runs on every reply. Source authority weights publishers by editorial accountability. Standards anchor confirms the citation maps to a real section of a real standard. Numeric specificity rejects vague magnitude claims. Corroboration looks for at least one independent confirmation. Contradiction check actively searches for sources that disagree and weighs them.
Below 0.80 is flagged.
Every reply ships with a confidence score. Above 0.80, the agent presents the answer normally. Between 0.50 and 0.80, the answer is marked ADVISORY with the uncertainty explained. Below 0.50, the agent declines to answer and explains why — usually because the domain is thin, the sources contradict, or the question hits a regulatory edge case that needs a licensed professional.
The hard rule: agents never assert certainty they do not have. A confident-sounding reply on a thin-evidence question is the most dangerous failure mode in advisory AI. We instrument against it directly.
Suppress when the uncertainty is too high.
Some questions deserve no answer. If a question is structurally ambiguous, or hits a regulatory boundary the agent does not have authority to opine on, or the confidence floor cannot be cleared — the agent suppresses the reply and tells you why.
This is unusual in the advisory-AI space. Most systems are tuned to produce something on every prompt. We tune against that pressure because a useless or wrong reply costs the asker more than a clean "we cannot answer this — here is who should."
The agents do not commit you to anything.
No transactions
Agents do not place trades, sign contracts, transfer money, or commit your firm to any external action. The agents are advisory at every step.
No PII without permission
Names, companies, and identifiers in your question stay anonymised in the reply unless you explicitly authorise otherwise.
No data resale
Your question, the working file, and the reply stay on our infrastructure. Never sold, never shared with third parties for marketing.
No silent updates
If we change a methodology that affects how a class of questions gets answered, we say so in Mix Weekly with the rationale.
Invite the corrections.
Methodology that nobody can audit is methodology nobody can challenge — and methodology nobody can challenge degrades over time. We publish so that you can email hello@ai-smart-buildings.com with "correction" in the subject when we have something wrong. Those corrections go to the top of the queue.
Test the methodology. Ask.
Bring a question and watch the principles run. Free, 48-hour reply, every citation linked, every confidence score disclosed.