A viral AI paper got the headline wrong. The real lesson underneath it is the one every operator evaluating "AI for buildings" should be testing for.
The global gap between target and actual office utilization just hit its lowest point since the pandemic — 18 percentage points, down from 25 a year ago. That sounds like progress, but for facility managers it is a warning.
Search "best AI building management system" and you get a leaderboard. Leaderboards sell ads. They do not survive contact with your building. Here is the comparison that does: not which platform wins, but which questions decide.
Most "AI building" pitches fail the same way: a confident demo, a number with no method behind it, and a contract that quietly makes the vendor's mistakes your problem. Here is the checklist we use before we trust one.
2026 is the year the building digital twin stops being a 3D dashboard and starts closing control loops. The market has crossed from pilot to production — but most of what vendors will sell you this year is still a visualization twin: a pretty model…
In January 2026 Taiwan started charging data centers a tiered electricity tariff — discounts for PUE under 1.3, surcharges up to 20% for the inefficient — while regulators across APAC quietly rewrote the deal: you no longer just buy grid capacity…
Willow, CIM and Facilio are three widely used smart building platforms that solve different problems. Willow builds a digital twin of a property's data. CIM analyses building performance and energy to cut operating cost.
PropTech capital is no longer rewarding software that helps your facilities team work faster — it is rewarding software that does the work without them.
The short version. A new capital-formation model — the "GP Studio" — is forming fast around emerging commercial real estate operators. It takes co-GP or operating-company equity in differentiated small managers and hands them the back office so they…