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Episode 187 is a conversation with James Dice and Rosy Khalife from Nexus Labs, as well as April Yi from CBRE.
Episode 187 is a conversation with James Dice and Rosy Khalife from Nexus Labs, as well as April Yi from CBRE. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
At the Nexus (1:50)
Sign off (33:57)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus Podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro membership. It's our global community of smart Boeing professionals. We have monthly events, paywall, deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just $35 a month.
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The links are below in the show notes, and now let's go on the podcast.
Welcome back to the Nexus podcast. It's James. I have Rosie here with me. Say hi, Rosie.
Rosy Khalife: Hi guys. And gal.
James Dice: It is the week [00:01:00] after Nexus Con. Um, so we are just kind of getting back into the swing of things like, what's my name? What day is it? I, I don't even know what day it is. Half the time this week for some reason.
Um, we have April Yee here with us, uh, from CBRE at Microsoft. Hi, April. Woo
Rosy Khalife: woo. Hi. Thanks for having me. April, thanks for being here. I'd love to give listeners a little bit more background on who you are, so maybe you could share with us what you currently do and, and how you ended up in this world.
April Yi: Sure.
Yeah. So I am the Director of digital engineering, um, for a very specific account. I've been with CBRE for three and a half years, um, which was actually just boosted by my formative career days. Uh, from the beginning to now, it's actually been full circle. I've always focused on technology, design, digital transformations, and innovation, um, and like growth strategy in [00:02:00] all the behind the scenes industries.
So commercial real estate and digital engineering was a perfect fit.
James Dice: How are you feeling after, uh, spending the week in Denver with us?
April Yi: I would say mentally exhausted, but also very motivated.
James Dice: Very motivated. That's like
April Yi: a really good way to say it. I feel the same way. Yeah. It was like I was super motivated coming out of it.
I came home and talked with my husband about it. I was chatting to colleagues and I'm like, all right, let. Let's just get things done. Let's make things happen. I love it. What do
James Dice: you think, what do you attribute that motivation to? Is it because there are people there that were doing things that you aren't doing?
Or is it just like generally the vibe of the show?
April Yi: Um, I would say a little bit of the vibe. It was primarily driven by the conversations that I heard and I participated in. One of the themes that I kept hearing had to do with questioning who has [00:03:00] ownership of this or who's responsible or accountable, um, who owns the data?
And it was a lot of like, who does this? Who owns this? How do we do this? And. There were honest conversations between all of the three categories of attendees who were lucky enough to be there. Um, but my takeaway from those conversations in that theme was if you're asking yourself this question and you're in your working environment.
Ask it out loud and just answer it with your partners or suggest, I don't think I own this. Do you think you own this? Yeah. Who does? Yeah. And like just answer it and figure it out. Like stop mulling and hemming and humming calling. Just go and ask the question, have the conversation and then you're good to go.
Let's keep things moving.
James Dice: That's awesome. [00:04:00] You had quite the show, so you, you spoke in two different sessions, like gave presentations in two different sessions and you MCed a third session and we gave you an award at the end, the, the next expert of the year. So like you were all over the place. I would say
April Yi: it was a busy conference.
Um, I was not anticipating it to be so busy. Uh, even though I knew I was participating in three of those sessions and excited about engaging in conversations, but in the end it was like the prep forced me to also dive in deeper into, you know, like what's truly going on. The sites that I'm managing and with my teams, and also because I was able toe one of the sessions, youe to me is not just like, oh, I'll just facilitate and tell you when to speak and ask you questions.
[00:05:00] It's my opportunity to learn about what others are doing. Like have those intimate conversations and then like dig into and like research truly what they're presenting on. 'cause you only have, if you haven't been to Nexus Con in a session, you only have a little teaser of a presentation before you open it up for questions.
So like that teaser's, like all you get as an mc when you're preparing, I'm like, okay, well what does like modelica actually do? What. Are these different solutions that people are. Yeah, it was busy, but it was very, very, uh, rewarding.
Rosy Khalife: You sort of set the standard for being a moderator, I would say. Um, I didn't even know you did this, but I saw Andrew from Ace IOT, Andrew Rogers post after Nexus Con.
You gave all your speakers like sort of a speaker wellness package that had Advil and had I, you know, like little different things for [00:06:00] them that was so sweet and so thoughtful. So we really need to probably incorporate that into. Our, our, you know, nexus approach to speakers. That's so cute. How did you come up with that?
I know she also
James Dice: had in the other session Nerds and Bingo cards. Maybe that was the same session, but like same.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Tell us more about that. 'cause I wasn't there and so I, I, I really missed out. It, it looked like a really fun session.
April Yi: Uh, I think one of my big things when I am asking people to spend their time with.
Me, um, or a panel or whatever. If I'm asking for your time, I wanna make it worth it. I wanna make it engaging, and I want to have a way to keep it fun regardless of how serious or mundane the topic could be. Um, and so the. Motivation for the speakers was, first of all, I have to thank and shout out to all of the speakers that were in the pan, OIMC, because none of them dropped [00:07:00] out.
Woo. The original five who were selected for the session and none of them dropped out and they were all super like responsive and engaging from the start. So as a thank you, it takes a lot to present, like all of the preparation. Um, and engagement with like, reviews and whatnot. So like, as a thank you for staying committed and not, not leaving us high and dry, um, I give them a little, like, I just like, I just wanna give them something like super small, simple.
And as a thank you, that's also consumable, so it's not gonna take up space or anything. So that was that piece. And then we're all, we've all acknowledged that we're quite nerdy in this space, and so Nerd Candies was. Kind of my signature move since last year. So I repeated that. It seemed to be a hit last year, so I figured I'd bring that back.
Um, and we were also this. Like the [00:08:00] last session of a very, very packed action packed day. And I was thinking, man, that's, that's a tough session to lead and like keep people engaged. At this point, people's brains are blowing up and they're just like melting all at the same time. So to like help them keep.
I don't know, just their attention or just make it fun a little bit. We talked as a team, like what do we do to like, make sure that, you know, they're present. And I can't remember who it was. I think it was actually Mike Robbins from Lockheed Martin who presented, who suggested what kind, what if we did like a bingo kind of thing.
Mm-hmm. And so since. All of our, you know, technologies and our industry is moving towards AI and we have all of these resources, we figured, well, let's put a nerdy bingo card together and put, make like different versions of it using AI and all the business jargon that's out [00:09:00] there and have some swag.
Amazing. That's awesome. That's so
James Dice: I agree with you, Rosie. She sets the standard. Yeah, we have um, it's really great, uh, 18 MCs per Nexus Con and, uh, we need to create like a how to be like April guide.
April Yi: Details matter is the
Rosy Khalife: takeaway
James Dice: details matter. I love that. That's
Rosy Khalife: really awesome. I'll, everyone who attended your sessions, I heard.
We heard such great feedback and so when we went into Nexus Con, we didn't know who's gonna win the next, like we had some, we had a short list for the NEX expert award, but we really tried to be present at the conference and talk to people that were there and, you know, share that short list and try to figure out like who's the right fit for this year.
And so, um, we're so happy that. You know, your name came up time and time again, and that you were so involved and that you really helped make it a success. And
James Dice: yeah,
Rosy Khalife: thank you. People's experience. So we wanna say thank you again. Thank.[00:10:00]
James Dice: April when I put you on the spot in, um, the closing keynote, you said something that I thought was interesting to bring up on, on this podcast. Um, which was that you took something from Nexus Con 2024 from the Lockheed Martin program, Devon and Deborah Tracy, yeah. Mm-hmm. And then you brought that back and implemented it, and then you showed up at Nexus Con 2025 talking about it.
And I just like had this moment on stage where I was like, oh, wow. That's so amazing because we've heard that before. Four from people we've, we heard a lot around like, well, I met this person and now we're working together. And then we've been working together for the last year and here we are together back at nexus com.
So I think it's something to highlight, but I also would love for you to give a shout out to Devin and, and tell her what you told, uh, the group. 'cause she wasn't able to make it.
April Yi: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so I actually reached out to her. Immediate after Nexus Con last year, and I said, I loved your session about gamifying [00:11:00] FDD and making it like, not just tangible, but like rewarding and fun for the technicians to engage in this opportunity.
Because at the end of the day, some of the conversations are, you know, like we have to motivate them, like tell them what the shared outcome is and we're gonna save X percent of energy,
James Dice: like super high level.
April Yi: Yeah. Like also realistically, I'm not gonna, uh, like I'll be blunt, technicians don't really care like they wanna do right by their client and right by their owners.
Sure. Also if they're incentivized to deliver on all of these required work orders, FDD is just another thing to do. Yeah. So how do you make it fun? And she mentioned a golden nugget, and that's something that they, I think shipped or passed around their technicians. Ours was a little bit different of an approach, but the same fundamental concept of gamify it.
[00:12:00] And incentivize them to participate. And so that's what from Nexus Con 2024 up until I think. December. It takes a bit of preparation, planning, really thoughtful attention to details and how you keep score and how you, you know, award whatever the award is. Um, we launched it in, I think February, um, and have been running through it and have been awarding quarterly prizes and people are engaging and it's like different people each quarter.
Which is pretty cool.
James Dice: That's awesome. That's awesome. That's so cool. I wanted to ask you about attending it for the first time and then attending it this year. What were your thoughts on sort of like how the community is evolving given that you know, a lot of the stuff that we tried out for the first time last year, we kept what worked and like let what didn't work fall away.
I would say one thing that we refined was like getting into the. [00:13:00] A session, getting into the breakout discussions and, and and, and doubling down on those versus you go to another conference that's much more rare. Right. And so I wonder how you feel about how, like, how the community is evolving and how the event is sort of taking on a life of its own.
April Yi: I think what is incredibly valuable of Nexus Con, and I don't throw the word valuable. Loosely, like to me, I only say there's something of value if I can show what the value is. You know, if there's a concept or there's, there might be potential value in something, but I don't say something is explicitly valuable until I actually experience and understand what that value is.
So I think the value that I get and got out of Nex Con and. I think it's evident that I returned and participated is that the [00:14:00] conversations were probably even more focused than last year, and it was great to begin with, but I think the conversations were even more focused. But at the same time, they also organically seem to plant seeds for continued evolution of Nexus Con, meaning there is a demand for.
Different conversation topics just as important, but we didn't get a chance to talk about them yet. So like people are actively thinking about the next version and different types of attendees that we might want to target so that we can have similar conversations or here's a different like version of this category.
So for example. Service providers can be pretty wide. CBRE is a service provider. They're also technology provider. But then you have consulting, uh, firms who [00:15:00] are service providers and they provide service in different ways. CBRE. There's the consulting aspect, there's the FM aspect, like boots on the ground.
Um, there's also technology providers who provide services and so there, even within service providers, there's nuance and even opportunity to have conversation amongst them from design in consultation to operations and boots on the ground. Like is there a gap there potentially? How do we bridge that across the industry and influence that bridge at specific accounts at each building with each owner?
Totally. So I think overall, yeah, I think it's just the conversations were focused and it started creating that demand and and expectation and really a need for more intentional and honest conversations, which is more [00:16:00] of Nexus cotton. Which is pretty cool.
James Dice: Yeah. On that service pro. Thank you. By the way, that, that means a lot to hear you say that on, on the service provider.
Thought I had someone come up to me and say like, I'm gonna get all the architects here next year, which I thought was funny. It is kind of along the same lines of what you're saying is like we need to be able to then take. This message that the community is converging upon, and then take it to these other stakeholders that aren't represented well there, or bring them in.
It's, it's one of the two. Mm-hmm. It's probably both. Mm-hmm. But like we need. The ability to communicate what we've all decided here To the architects or to the, and contractors.
Rosy Khalife: Like there's some, or the contractors. Yeah. There's some gaps. Some gaps that mm-hmm. Would really make a big impact if we could just get them in the conversation.
James Dice: Yeah. This was, um, Rob and Ade from Overcast. He was saying this, he was basically saying like. The architects need to be here. It's like a, it's a problem for [00:17:00] them that they're not here kind of thing. Yes. Mm-hmm. Which I thought was interesting.
April Yi: That's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a blind spot.
James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, let's talk about the sessions you were in. Um, so the first one was AI for energy management, uh, real case studies. You were a presenter in this one. Do you just wanna take us through and, and um, just take us through the, kind of the highlights of it and. I will tell people straight up that there we're gonna have recordings.
There's gonna be a bundle you can purchase of all the recordings that'll come with the slides and summaries of the sessions and all of that. Or you can just be a Nexus Pro Ember, and you'll get this as part of your membership. Um, and so that's coming out Rosie in the next few weeks, I think. Yeah. We're,
Rosy Khalife: we're just editing it and they're gonna be awesome.
There's just, so, yeah, I, I wanna watch all of 'em because I couldn't be in, you know, six places at once, so I'm excited too. Also, me too, myself. Yeah.
James Dice: Yeah. So, April on the AI for Energy Management, [00:18:00] uh, session, that one sounded cool. What, what was that all about?
April Yi: Uh, it was a real case study. It's a very, um, specific case study.
We have others across, but I wanted to hone in on this because it was implemented. We actively use it. We've iterated on, um, and it's still in. Place today, but it's driven on a very simple concept of when to start your HVAC systems for the day and when to stop them or end them for the day. Um, and the AI part, it's actually just machine learning.
There isn't really the additional like. Human brain cognitive component. It's taking a specific set of data, well specific sets of data and continuing to learn, um, based on those continually updated data sets, [00:19:00] and we use outdoor temperature. Indoor temperature occupancy. Um, I think those are the three primary data sets that we're using.
So we have an API to A Trusted Weather, uh, source. And then we have our, all of our own sensors in-house as well as, um, occupancy data. It could be sensors, it could be badge swipes, uh, whatever your mechanism is. And building four different models, which is how long. Would it take for our building to ramp up to temperature in the morning or ramp down in the evening?
So there's, those are two different models. Um, both the same regression, but two different models to build that out. And then also, um, the estimated time. When occupancy would reach 80%, 90%, 10%, 20%, [00:20:00] um, on the front end and on the back end. So based on those four different models, it automatically adjusts the HVAC systems.
Which for one building probably not a big deal, but when you're talking about a campus with a hundred buildings all around town and very different, uh, building behaviors, um, somebody called buildings snowflakes at the conference, and I think it's super accurate. Um, every building is. Different and they behave differently.
Every system that's set up there is different. And so basically taking in the nuance of each building and the occupancy times that those business groups arrive, allow us as a centralized small team to better manage schedules, optimizing comfort without over, um, overindexing on energy consumption by [00:21:00] starting earlier and waiting to.
Shut it down.
James Dice: That's really good. That's a
April Yi: broad concept. Yeah.
James Dice: That's great. And do you see the schedules that. End up, up getting implemented as because of this, these machine learning models, do the schedules change quite a bit, like week to week?
April Yi: Yeah. Um, so the other, oh, I guess the other dataset is its own historical smart, uh, smart start, smart stop times based on the relative data.
So it's updating every day. Um, and then it looks also at week trends. So Monday through Friday, what are the trends, or even really Sunday through Saturday. Um, and we're at a point now where we can look at seasonal trends and that's another aspect that's influencing that change. The, the actual start and stop times don't adjust that [00:22:00] much, but.
Every minute makes a difference. So I think over the course of three months, we saw a change in roughly like 2,500 hours, either adjusted forward or backwards in just three months across, um, across our portfolio. So it definitely adds up. And it definitely makes a difference, um, from season to season.
James Dice: Very cool.
All right, let's move on to, you're the one of the rare speakers that switched tracks. So we had energy management, fm, ITO, ot. You spoke two different tracks. I think there was only one or two more people. And in the whole conference, she's a
Rosy Khalife: Swiss Army knife over here. Swiss Army knife.
James Dice: Um, so you, you spoke in the uh, um, network visibility, the OT interoperability.
Session and then you MCed the Nerds Toolbox session. Do you wanna just give us an overview of those two?
April Yi: Ping from Tigo [00:23:00] Networks actually approached me regarding the opportunity to present and it is on a case study that we are still actively using. But really the whole premise of that is. We were experiencing some BMS schedules that were not getting pushed out, but we didn't know that until there was an escalation and somebody said, it's getting warm in here, or It is very warm in here.
Can we adjust it? And we'd respond to the hot and cold and adjust it. And also notice, well, the schedule never pushed to start, and we were noticing these in like spurts at a time. It wasn't consistent, there wasn't a very clear pattern. We engaged our vendor, we tried troubleshooting, we engaged our vendor to troubleshoot our BMS vendor to troubleshoot.
Um, and then we realized, okay, well none of this is working. We had been troubleshooting for, I wanna say like four to six months on our own, and it was [00:24:00] still going on until we remembered and realized, you know, we have a tool that we haven't. Like explored yet for this situation. And it was really built on the premise of visibility of our backnet traffic.
And so we're like, okay, let's dive in. Let's school ourselves on how this tool works and how to use it for this use case. And almost immediately we were able to find. Backnet traffic, basically bottlenecks in certain places, one of which being a massive bottleneck between what we're calling East and West campus.
Basically, all of those campus traffic packets were bottlenecked at one choke point, and we would never have known that ever. And when we dug in a little bit deeper, it basically was a, I think. May through October was when we started looking at, um, [00:25:00] ati Tigo, visual Backnet, and then November until we resolved that choke point, um, troubleshooting, understanding why there was a choke point, and the lesson learned here was nobody did anything wrong, those systems.
Weren't integrated incorrectly. They were incor, they were integrated in a way that worked at the time that they were commissioned. The various BMS servers. Um, we were using Iconix at the time and iconic servers, the way they were integrated in and built in as far as traffic patterns. Nobody did anything wrong, but they were all just overlaid over time in different, you know, eras of management.
And it created this like. This choke point that we never would have seen without having that visibility. So the takeaway is sometimes even if nobody does anything wrong, you can have issues that you can only [00:26:00] relieve. Through visibility of your network, like know what's going on in your network and how it's like interacting with all of your other systems and looking back, doing an analysis.
This was going on for about two years and it was about 118,000 hours of, I guess, missed schedule starts that we would never have been able to. Figure out it was just a needle in a haystack. Wow. Yeah. Tangible, like super, super use case. That is also hard to like justify when you're saying, I need network visibility.
I need this tool. It's gonna cost X amount. And your stakeholder saying, well, what is it gonna save us? It's really saving us the risk and the hassle and all the time and energy that it's taking to troubleshoot on top of their normal workloads. But like, how do you tangibly like [00:27:00] demonstrate that if everything is unknown, like only until we had that visibility were we able to actually produce numbers.
Right? Right. So. It's tricky, but it was worth it and we've definitely shared the use case and yeah, still in place today.
James Dice: If you haven't been in Nexus Con, I think one of the things that I am sort of zeroing in on is when is it a sort of like an ideal session layout and so. I think if I would've been in your session, I would've wanted to watch your presentation, which is probably about 15 minutes, right?
And then I would want to go sit at your table and fire questions at you. Such as how did you make the business case April blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Yeah. And one of the sessions I was in was, um, around FDD and we actually had that happen. So, um, Andrew from LinkedIn presented about their FDD program, and then Andrew went over there and sat at table seven and I was like, I got more questions for Andrew.
[00:28:00] I'm gonna go sit at table seven. And there were 10 other people like me that also had questions for Andrew. I'm sure they were curious about the other sessions, but they were mostly focused on, I wanna do what Andrew did essentially, right? Mm-hmm. And so that was one of my big learnings, like year one. I don't know about about you, Rosie.
Year one, I was so worried about. All of the logistical things that I didn't actually sit in any sessions, like literally was not present at any sessions this year. I like made my own agenda in the app for the first time and like went and sat and participated in the sessions and. I experienced just a little bit of magic around, like, I hear April talk, I'm gonna go sit with April on a, in a small table, and for 20, 30 minutes just have a discussion with her, given the context of that case study.
So I'm excited about like, how do we make every single session like that next time? [00:29:00]
April Yi: Yeah. I would say that was similar to the session that I emceed, um, on open source for the space and how people are leveraging it. Like again, this session was also focused on real case studies of what people have done and successfully implemented and.
The design of this one was also slightly different. When I chatted with Brad about, you know, preparing for the session, he was thinking, he threw the concept of what if we had some demos of these open source tools? Because the beauty of open source is that it's available to anyone and everyone, and you can use it in all these different ways.
And I said, yeah, I think that's a great idea, great idea. And we iterated on a few different versions of it, and that was exactly what came of it. Everybody had a six minute teaser to present what they used and how they used it, and the [00:30:00] context in which it would be applicable. And then we set up demo tables for each of them to have deeper conversations about what they presented that resonated and spoke to the attendees.
And they could also see it or ask prompt questions, and then they could test out, you know, a. Like a test of what they were actually describing. Um, so that was actually really cool. It does, it did require also, again, a little more prep out of these session speakers, so huge kudos to them, uh, for participating in humoring that concept.
Um, but that was exactly, there was a lot of, there were rich conversations that came out of that and ideas, I think.
James Dice: Cool. And when people go to the recordings on that one, that one's called the Nerds Toolbox, so that, that'll be able to check that one out. Um, I did wanna ask you related to the I it OT track since you spent so much time in there.[00:31:00]
Um, one of the things that we announced at the end of Nexus Con is that we're gonna be doing what we're calling a Nexus cast, which is like a half day, three quarters of a day event focused on the it o OT track. Only, and that's gonna be coming up on December 10th for people that wanna, wanna, um, grab a ticket and, you know, put it on your calendar.
Uh, we'll be sending out more information about that. But April, I wanted to ask you, um, this is our, our little bit of research before we put together the sessions for that, given the track that you participated in there and the different sessions, whether it be open source or network visibility, et cetera.
What do you think, and I'm just springing this on you, you don't know that I'm gonna ask you this, but what do you think in that track, what are the owners that are thinking about OT and cybersecurity and networking? Um, what should we include? Like what are the, the, the problems that are sort of top, top of mind for that track right now for the people in that [00:32:00] track?
April Yi: I think really it's about also, I'm gonna borrow another line from Mike Province that he presented in and. Expose myself. I am not the nerd you're looking for. Um, but with that being said, my personal observations and perspective would be for owners. They may not know the. Impact the operational cost, labor burden, impact of the type of systems they put into their buildings.
Especially as an owner, because you're life cycling your systems at different points of, you know, their various life cycles. And based on how, two things, based on what they put in and the scopes that they receive, how were the providers? Building out their architecture, like that's a big difference. Are they home [00:33:00] runs in your OT or are they daisy chained?
Which takes a lot more maintenance and a lot more burden, and a lot more like monitoring of systems and downtime. And the other aspect is when, when you implement a system or a solution. How is your ops team going? Like how are they going to operate the building and like see that building? So again, you might have all these solutions that you're like, okay, let's do this.
And have special lighting systems, or they're gonna bring in occupancy sensors or you know, even their like WAP systems, but they put all this in and then if they don't have a way to see how it's architected and overlaid on one another, it kind of goes back to what happened. Nobody integrated it incorrectly, but all of that traffic, like is that operator, the people who are running your [00:34:00]facilities.
What are they going to experience with all of the decisions that you're making based on either lowest cost or, you know, best relationship or service? Love it, whatnot.
James Dice: Love it. Okay. Thank you for that input. Uh, we hope to see you there. Um, we're gonna, our team is challenged over the next few weeks and months with trying to take the magic of Nexus Con and, and making it happen online in a, in a day or two or a half day.
Um. It's not the full magic. There's no way that we could possibly, no way replace, replace the in person case. But just like, can we get close to it, asymptotically or something? Um, alright, let's end this with some carve outs. Um, Rosie, I'm gonna make you go first. What you, my goodness.
Rosy Khalife: Why that's not the order in the outline.
How dare you. Okay. Carve out, um. Well, uh, this is gonna be a food [00:35:00] one because apparently that's what I'm known for, uh, as James said already in, uh, when we were getting started with the podcast. So I've been into different kinds of salt lately, which is a little bit random. But anyways, I love. Uh, flaky salt car
James Dice: carve outs are meant to be random.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, good. Well, I love flaky salt, and there's a whole world of flaky salt. Yes. As you may or may not know, and so you can, so there's some that are, you know, flavored that are artificially flavored, so we're not talking about those. But the ones that are. Not artificially flavored like um, ones that have like lemon zest and you can make 'em yourself.
And so I've made lemon zest, just lemon zest and salt and you put it in a little thing and then you use that so good. Um, celery salt, which is basically like celery seeds with salt. It's really nice. Um, so I've been getting into like making flavored salt and it's so random, but it's really adds a kick to whatever you're making and it's so fun.
And I have these like [00:36:00] little. You know little jars of my kitchen and you would think I'm like a mad scientist. So anyways, highly recommend those that are listening. Give it a try. It's easy to do. There's a bunch of different ways of doing it. It's not a lot of work and it's actually adds a lot of fun to your meal.
James Dice: That's awesome.
Rosy Khalife: Thank you.
James Dice: Yeah. Um, I'll go next. Um, mine is my girlfriend, Becca and I were crazy enough to adopt a puppy on the day after Nexus gone. Oh my God. Which I regret heavily, um, because of, you know, the not, I don't regret the doing it, the timing of it is what I regret. Um, you know, the three weeks probably before Nexus Connor.
Very intense. And then, so then to then add that into. Puppy, puppy land, uh, has been a, a weird transition, but we would've had to wait, I think three more weeks. Like we were already attached to this puppy via FaceTime, and we decided that we loved her. And so we would've had to wait for three more [00:37:00] weeks if we wouldn't have got her on the day after next.
That's awesome. And so just the timing of it. So I'm currently in like, how do I raise a puppy? How do I train a puppy land? Um, it's a
Rosy Khalife: whole thing.
James Dice: So if anyone listening to this wants to send me some tips, I, you know the one thing about tips is everyone disagrees with everybody else. So like you That's right.
Learn something about training and then you go to the next person that's like, don't do it like that. Do it like this. And I'm just like a little bit overwhelmed right now. Yeah.
April Yi: Rabbit holes everywhere.
James Dice: Rabbit holes. So many rabbit holes. Yeah. So we have a trainer raising children. We have a lifesaver trainer.
Yeah. Similar probably. Totally. We have a lifesaver trainer that we're expecting to save our life. She comes to our house tomorrow, so
Rosy Khalife: isn't that funny when we like put all of our quite literal eggs and hope and dreams and the one person you're like, save me.
James Dice: That's, that's exactly where I'm at right now.
She's gonna come into our house and, and Becca and I are gonna be like. Help us. We're depending on you. My other [00:38:00] carve out is I had, um, Jacob Jackson who attended the conference, uh, handed me this book that he published called Smart Buildings by Design, how The Fourth Trade Connects It All With the Purdue Model.
I have not opened this book yet, but thank you Jacob for bringing it, bringing me a copy That's awesome. At the conference.
Rosy Khalife: That is awesome. Yeah. Shout out to Jacob.
April Yi: Yeah. Um, okay. Okay. April, you're up. Uh, my carve out, I was inspired by the term carve out, so I am a skier and sailboat hobbyist, and so that's actually how my husband and I met actually racing sailboats, and we had a once in a lifetime opportunity to race a regatta circuit championship.
In the British Virgin at the end of this month with our really, really good sailing friends and we can't wait to it all. But mostly the party,
Rosy Khalife: but also the, that is so fun. [00:39:00] Is this like an organized effort? Like can we google this thing that you're doing or is not really Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's it called?
April Yi: Uh, it's called, oh gosh, the, they changed their names, but if you look up Sailing World. Okay. Regattas, what is it? SW And where is It's in BC you said.
Rosy Khalife: It's in the bvs oh B. Okay. Yeah. Vir Virgin Islands. Got it. Okay. Yeah, I'm thinking of British Columbia 'cause Ainsley lives there and so that's, that's just, that's where my head's at these days.
Right, right, right. That's so cool.
James Dice: Pic tropics area. Yeah.
April Yi: Tropical place. Yeah. The end coming from Pacific Northwest. It'll be a welcome relief from the Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited
Rosy Khalife: for you to do that. Yeah, that's awesome. I hope you post a photo. Good luck with that. Have a blast.
James Dice: Thanks. Thanks. Well, April, thanks for taking the time this week, busy week and, and sharing your, uh, reflections.
Appreciate you.
April Yi: Thank you for Thank you so much for having me.[00:40:00]
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends, thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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Episode 187 is a conversation with James Dice and Rosy Khalife from Nexus Labs, as well as April Yi from CBRE.
Episode 187 is a conversation with James Dice and Rosy Khalife from Nexus Labs, as well as April Yi from CBRE. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
At the Nexus (1:50)
Sign off (33:57)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus Podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro membership. It's our global community of smart Boeing professionals. We have monthly events, paywall, deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just $35 a month.
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The links are below in the show notes, and now let's go on the podcast.
Welcome back to the Nexus podcast. It's James. I have Rosie here with me. Say hi, Rosie.
Rosy Khalife: Hi guys. And gal.
James Dice: It is the week [00:01:00] after Nexus Con. Um, so we are just kind of getting back into the swing of things like, what's my name? What day is it? I, I don't even know what day it is. Half the time this week for some reason.
Um, we have April Yee here with us, uh, from CBRE at Microsoft. Hi, April. Woo
Rosy Khalife: woo. Hi. Thanks for having me. April, thanks for being here. I'd love to give listeners a little bit more background on who you are, so maybe you could share with us what you currently do and, and how you ended up in this world.
April Yi: Sure.
Yeah. So I am the Director of digital engineering, um, for a very specific account. I've been with CBRE for three and a half years, um, which was actually just boosted by my formative career days. Uh, from the beginning to now, it's actually been full circle. I've always focused on technology, design, digital transformations, and innovation, um, and like growth strategy in [00:02:00] all the behind the scenes industries.
So commercial real estate and digital engineering was a perfect fit.
James Dice: How are you feeling after, uh, spending the week in Denver with us?
April Yi: I would say mentally exhausted, but also very motivated.
James Dice: Very motivated. That's like
April Yi: a really good way to say it. I feel the same way. Yeah. It was like I was super motivated coming out of it.
I came home and talked with my husband about it. I was chatting to colleagues and I'm like, all right, let. Let's just get things done. Let's make things happen. I love it. What do
James Dice: you think, what do you attribute that motivation to? Is it because there are people there that were doing things that you aren't doing?
Or is it just like generally the vibe of the show?
April Yi: Um, I would say a little bit of the vibe. It was primarily driven by the conversations that I heard and I participated in. One of the themes that I kept hearing had to do with questioning who has [00:03:00] ownership of this or who's responsible or accountable, um, who owns the data?
And it was a lot of like, who does this? Who owns this? How do we do this? And. There were honest conversations between all of the three categories of attendees who were lucky enough to be there. Um, but my takeaway from those conversations in that theme was if you're asking yourself this question and you're in your working environment.
Ask it out loud and just answer it with your partners or suggest, I don't think I own this. Do you think you own this? Yeah. Who does? Yeah. And like just answer it and figure it out. Like stop mulling and hemming and humming calling. Just go and ask the question, have the conversation and then you're good to go.
Let's keep things moving.
James Dice: That's awesome. [00:04:00] You had quite the show, so you, you spoke in two different sessions, like gave presentations in two different sessions and you MCed a third session and we gave you an award at the end, the, the next expert of the year. So like you were all over the place. I would say
April Yi: it was a busy conference.
Um, I was not anticipating it to be so busy. Uh, even though I knew I was participating in three of those sessions and excited about engaging in conversations, but in the end it was like the prep forced me to also dive in deeper into, you know, like what's truly going on. The sites that I'm managing and with my teams, and also because I was able toe one of the sessions, youe to me is not just like, oh, I'll just facilitate and tell you when to speak and ask you questions.
[00:05:00] It's my opportunity to learn about what others are doing. Like have those intimate conversations and then like dig into and like research truly what they're presenting on. 'cause you only have, if you haven't been to Nexus Con in a session, you only have a little teaser of a presentation before you open it up for questions.
So like that teaser's, like all you get as an mc when you're preparing, I'm like, okay, well what does like modelica actually do? What. Are these different solutions that people are. Yeah, it was busy, but it was very, very, uh, rewarding.
Rosy Khalife: You sort of set the standard for being a moderator, I would say. Um, I didn't even know you did this, but I saw Andrew from Ace IOT, Andrew Rogers post after Nexus Con.
You gave all your speakers like sort of a speaker wellness package that had Advil and had I, you know, like little different things for [00:06:00] them that was so sweet and so thoughtful. So we really need to probably incorporate that into. Our, our, you know, nexus approach to speakers. That's so cute. How did you come up with that?
I know she also
James Dice: had in the other session Nerds and Bingo cards. Maybe that was the same session, but like same.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Tell us more about that. 'cause I wasn't there and so I, I, I really missed out. It, it looked like a really fun session.
April Yi: Uh, I think one of my big things when I am asking people to spend their time with.
Me, um, or a panel or whatever. If I'm asking for your time, I wanna make it worth it. I wanna make it engaging, and I want to have a way to keep it fun regardless of how serious or mundane the topic could be. Um, and so the. Motivation for the speakers was, first of all, I have to thank and shout out to all of the speakers that were in the pan, OIMC, because none of them dropped [00:07:00] out.
Woo. The original five who were selected for the session and none of them dropped out and they were all super like responsive and engaging from the start. So as a thank you, it takes a lot to present, like all of the preparation. Um, and engagement with like, reviews and whatnot. So like, as a thank you for staying committed and not, not leaving us high and dry, um, I give them a little, like, I just like, I just wanna give them something like super small, simple.
And as a thank you, that's also consumable, so it's not gonna take up space or anything. So that was that piece. And then we're all, we've all acknowledged that we're quite nerdy in this space, and so Nerd Candies was. Kind of my signature move since last year. So I repeated that. It seemed to be a hit last year, so I figured I'd bring that back.
Um, and we were also this. Like the [00:08:00] last session of a very, very packed action packed day. And I was thinking, man, that's, that's a tough session to lead and like keep people engaged. At this point, people's brains are blowing up and they're just like melting all at the same time. So to like help them keep.
I don't know, just their attention or just make it fun a little bit. We talked as a team, like what do we do to like, make sure that, you know, they're present. And I can't remember who it was. I think it was actually Mike Robbins from Lockheed Martin who presented, who suggested what kind, what if we did like a bingo kind of thing.
Mm-hmm. And so since. All of our, you know, technologies and our industry is moving towards AI and we have all of these resources, we figured, well, let's put a nerdy bingo card together and put, make like different versions of it using AI and all the business jargon that's out [00:09:00] there and have some swag.
Amazing. That's awesome. That's so
James Dice: I agree with you, Rosie. She sets the standard. Yeah, we have um, it's really great, uh, 18 MCs per Nexus Con and, uh, we need to create like a how to be like April guide.
April Yi: Details matter is the
Rosy Khalife: takeaway
James Dice: details matter. I love that. That's
Rosy Khalife: really awesome. I'll, everyone who attended your sessions, I heard.
We heard such great feedback and so when we went into Nexus Con, we didn't know who's gonna win the next, like we had some, we had a short list for the NEX expert award, but we really tried to be present at the conference and talk to people that were there and, you know, share that short list and try to figure out like who's the right fit for this year.
And so, um, we're so happy that. You know, your name came up time and time again, and that you were so involved and that you really helped make it a success. And
James Dice: yeah,
Rosy Khalife: thank you. People's experience. So we wanna say thank you again. Thank.[00:10:00]
James Dice: April when I put you on the spot in, um, the closing keynote, you said something that I thought was interesting to bring up on, on this podcast. Um, which was that you took something from Nexus Con 2024 from the Lockheed Martin program, Devon and Deborah Tracy, yeah. Mm-hmm. And then you brought that back and implemented it, and then you showed up at Nexus Con 2025 talking about it.
And I just like had this moment on stage where I was like, oh, wow. That's so amazing because we've heard that before. Four from people we've, we heard a lot around like, well, I met this person and now we're working together. And then we've been working together for the last year and here we are together back at nexus com.
So I think it's something to highlight, but I also would love for you to give a shout out to Devin and, and tell her what you told, uh, the group. 'cause she wasn't able to make it.
April Yi: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so I actually reached out to her. Immediate after Nexus Con last year, and I said, I loved your session about gamifying [00:11:00] FDD and making it like, not just tangible, but like rewarding and fun for the technicians to engage in this opportunity.
Because at the end of the day, some of the conversations are, you know, like we have to motivate them, like tell them what the shared outcome is and we're gonna save X percent of energy,
James Dice: like super high level.
April Yi: Yeah. Like also realistically, I'm not gonna, uh, like I'll be blunt, technicians don't really care like they wanna do right by their client and right by their owners.
Sure. Also if they're incentivized to deliver on all of these required work orders, FDD is just another thing to do. Yeah. So how do you make it fun? And she mentioned a golden nugget, and that's something that they, I think shipped or passed around their technicians. Ours was a little bit different of an approach, but the same fundamental concept of gamify it.
[00:12:00] And incentivize them to participate. And so that's what from Nexus Con 2024 up until I think. December. It takes a bit of preparation, planning, really thoughtful attention to details and how you keep score and how you, you know, award whatever the award is. Um, we launched it in, I think February, um, and have been running through it and have been awarding quarterly prizes and people are engaging and it's like different people each quarter.
Which is pretty cool.
James Dice: That's awesome. That's awesome. That's so cool. I wanted to ask you about attending it for the first time and then attending it this year. What were your thoughts on sort of like how the community is evolving given that you know, a lot of the stuff that we tried out for the first time last year, we kept what worked and like let what didn't work fall away.
I would say one thing that we refined was like getting into the. [00:13:00] A session, getting into the breakout discussions and, and and, and doubling down on those versus you go to another conference that's much more rare. Right. And so I wonder how you feel about how, like, how the community is evolving and how the event is sort of taking on a life of its own.
April Yi: I think what is incredibly valuable of Nexus Con, and I don't throw the word valuable. Loosely, like to me, I only say there's something of value if I can show what the value is. You know, if there's a concept or there's, there might be potential value in something, but I don't say something is explicitly valuable until I actually experience and understand what that value is.
So I think the value that I get and got out of Nex Con and. I think it's evident that I returned and participated is that the [00:14:00] conversations were probably even more focused than last year, and it was great to begin with, but I think the conversations were even more focused. But at the same time, they also organically seem to plant seeds for continued evolution of Nexus Con, meaning there is a demand for.
Different conversation topics just as important, but we didn't get a chance to talk about them yet. So like people are actively thinking about the next version and different types of attendees that we might want to target so that we can have similar conversations or here's a different like version of this category.
So for example. Service providers can be pretty wide. CBRE is a service provider. They're also technology provider. But then you have consulting, uh, firms who [00:15:00] are service providers and they provide service in different ways. CBRE. There's the consulting aspect, there's the FM aspect, like boots on the ground.
Um, there's also technology providers who provide services and so there, even within service providers, there's nuance and even opportunity to have conversation amongst them from design in consultation to operations and boots on the ground. Like is there a gap there potentially? How do we bridge that across the industry and influence that bridge at specific accounts at each building with each owner?
Totally. So I think overall, yeah, I think it's just the conversations were focused and it started creating that demand and and expectation and really a need for more intentional and honest conversations, which is more [00:16:00] of Nexus cotton. Which is pretty cool.
James Dice: Yeah. On that service pro. Thank you. By the way, that, that means a lot to hear you say that on, on the service provider.
Thought I had someone come up to me and say like, I'm gonna get all the architects here next year, which I thought was funny. It is kind of along the same lines of what you're saying is like we need to be able to then take. This message that the community is converging upon, and then take it to these other stakeholders that aren't represented well there, or bring them in.
It's, it's one of the two. Mm-hmm. It's probably both. Mm-hmm. But like we need. The ability to communicate what we've all decided here To the architects or to the, and contractors.
Rosy Khalife: Like there's some, or the contractors. Yeah. There's some gaps. Some gaps that mm-hmm. Would really make a big impact if we could just get them in the conversation.
James Dice: Yeah. This was, um, Rob and Ade from Overcast. He was saying this, he was basically saying like. The architects need to be here. It's like a, it's a problem for [00:17:00] them that they're not here kind of thing. Yes. Mm-hmm. Which I thought was interesting.
April Yi: That's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a blind spot.
James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, let's talk about the sessions you were in. Um, so the first one was AI for energy management, uh, real case studies. You were a presenter in this one. Do you just wanna take us through and, and um, just take us through the, kind of the highlights of it and. I will tell people straight up that there we're gonna have recordings.
There's gonna be a bundle you can purchase of all the recordings that'll come with the slides and summaries of the sessions and all of that. Or you can just be a Nexus Pro Ember, and you'll get this as part of your membership. Um, and so that's coming out Rosie in the next few weeks, I think. Yeah. We're,
Rosy Khalife: we're just editing it and they're gonna be awesome.
There's just, so, yeah, I, I wanna watch all of 'em because I couldn't be in, you know, six places at once, so I'm excited too. Also, me too, myself. Yeah.
James Dice: Yeah. So, April on the AI for Energy Management, [00:18:00] uh, session, that one sounded cool. What, what was that all about?
April Yi: Uh, it was a real case study. It's a very, um, specific case study.
We have others across, but I wanted to hone in on this because it was implemented. We actively use it. We've iterated on, um, and it's still in. Place today, but it's driven on a very simple concept of when to start your HVAC systems for the day and when to stop them or end them for the day. Um, and the AI part, it's actually just machine learning.
There isn't really the additional like. Human brain cognitive component. It's taking a specific set of data, well specific sets of data and continuing to learn, um, based on those continually updated data sets, [00:19:00] and we use outdoor temperature. Indoor temperature occupancy. Um, I think those are the three primary data sets that we're using.
So we have an API to A Trusted Weather, uh, source. And then we have our, all of our own sensors in-house as well as, um, occupancy data. It could be sensors, it could be badge swipes, uh, whatever your mechanism is. And building four different models, which is how long. Would it take for our building to ramp up to temperature in the morning or ramp down in the evening?
So there's, those are two different models. Um, both the same regression, but two different models to build that out. And then also, um, the estimated time. When occupancy would reach 80%, 90%, 10%, 20%, [00:20:00] um, on the front end and on the back end. So based on those four different models, it automatically adjusts the HVAC systems.
Which for one building probably not a big deal, but when you're talking about a campus with a hundred buildings all around town and very different, uh, building behaviors, um, somebody called buildings snowflakes at the conference, and I think it's super accurate. Um, every building is. Different and they behave differently.
Every system that's set up there is different. And so basically taking in the nuance of each building and the occupancy times that those business groups arrive, allow us as a centralized small team to better manage schedules, optimizing comfort without over, um, overindexing on energy consumption by [00:21:00] starting earlier and waiting to.
Shut it down.
James Dice: That's really good. That's a
April Yi: broad concept. Yeah.
James Dice: That's great. And do you see the schedules that. End up, up getting implemented as because of this, these machine learning models, do the schedules change quite a bit, like week to week?
April Yi: Yeah. Um, so the other, oh, I guess the other dataset is its own historical smart, uh, smart start, smart stop times based on the relative data.
So it's updating every day. Um, and then it looks also at week trends. So Monday through Friday, what are the trends, or even really Sunday through Saturday. Um, and we're at a point now where we can look at seasonal trends and that's another aspect that's influencing that change. The, the actual start and stop times don't adjust that [00:22:00] much, but.
Every minute makes a difference. So I think over the course of three months, we saw a change in roughly like 2,500 hours, either adjusted forward or backwards in just three months across, um, across our portfolio. So it definitely adds up. And it definitely makes a difference, um, from season to season.
James Dice: Very cool.
All right, let's move on to, you're the one of the rare speakers that switched tracks. So we had energy management, fm, ITO, ot. You spoke two different tracks. I think there was only one or two more people. And in the whole conference, she's a
Rosy Khalife: Swiss Army knife over here. Swiss Army knife.
James Dice: Um, so you, you spoke in the uh, um, network visibility, the OT interoperability.
Session and then you MCed the Nerds Toolbox session. Do you wanna just give us an overview of those two?
April Yi: Ping from Tigo [00:23:00] Networks actually approached me regarding the opportunity to present and it is on a case study that we are still actively using. But really the whole premise of that is. We were experiencing some BMS schedules that were not getting pushed out, but we didn't know that until there was an escalation and somebody said, it's getting warm in here, or It is very warm in here.
Can we adjust it? And we'd respond to the hot and cold and adjust it. And also notice, well, the schedule never pushed to start, and we were noticing these in like spurts at a time. It wasn't consistent, there wasn't a very clear pattern. We engaged our vendor, we tried troubleshooting, we engaged our vendor to troubleshoot our BMS vendor to troubleshoot.
Um, and then we realized, okay, well none of this is working. We had been troubleshooting for, I wanna say like four to six months on our own, and it was [00:24:00] still going on until we remembered and realized, you know, we have a tool that we haven't. Like explored yet for this situation. And it was really built on the premise of visibility of our backnet traffic.
And so we're like, okay, let's dive in. Let's school ourselves on how this tool works and how to use it for this use case. And almost immediately we were able to find. Backnet traffic, basically bottlenecks in certain places, one of which being a massive bottleneck between what we're calling East and West campus.
Basically, all of those campus traffic packets were bottlenecked at one choke point, and we would never have known that ever. And when we dug in a little bit deeper, it basically was a, I think. May through October was when we started looking at, um, [00:25:00] ati Tigo, visual Backnet, and then November until we resolved that choke point, um, troubleshooting, understanding why there was a choke point, and the lesson learned here was nobody did anything wrong, those systems.
Weren't integrated incorrectly. They were incor, they were integrated in a way that worked at the time that they were commissioned. The various BMS servers. Um, we were using Iconix at the time and iconic servers, the way they were integrated in and built in as far as traffic patterns. Nobody did anything wrong, but they were all just overlaid over time in different, you know, eras of management.
And it created this like. This choke point that we never would have seen without having that visibility. So the takeaway is sometimes even if nobody does anything wrong, you can have issues that you can only [00:26:00] relieve. Through visibility of your network, like know what's going on in your network and how it's like interacting with all of your other systems and looking back, doing an analysis.
This was going on for about two years and it was about 118,000 hours of, I guess, missed schedule starts that we would never have been able to. Figure out it was just a needle in a haystack. Wow. Yeah. Tangible, like super, super use case. That is also hard to like justify when you're saying, I need network visibility.
I need this tool. It's gonna cost X amount. And your stakeholder saying, well, what is it gonna save us? It's really saving us the risk and the hassle and all the time and energy that it's taking to troubleshoot on top of their normal workloads. But like, how do you tangibly like [00:27:00] demonstrate that if everything is unknown, like only until we had that visibility were we able to actually produce numbers.
Right? Right. So. It's tricky, but it was worth it and we've definitely shared the use case and yeah, still in place today.
James Dice: If you haven't been in Nexus Con, I think one of the things that I am sort of zeroing in on is when is it a sort of like an ideal session layout and so. I think if I would've been in your session, I would've wanted to watch your presentation, which is probably about 15 minutes, right?
And then I would want to go sit at your table and fire questions at you. Such as how did you make the business case April blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Yeah. And one of the sessions I was in was, um, around FDD and we actually had that happen. So, um, Andrew from LinkedIn presented about their FDD program, and then Andrew went over there and sat at table seven and I was like, I got more questions for Andrew.
[00:28:00] I'm gonna go sit at table seven. And there were 10 other people like me that also had questions for Andrew. I'm sure they were curious about the other sessions, but they were mostly focused on, I wanna do what Andrew did essentially, right? Mm-hmm. And so that was one of my big learnings, like year one. I don't know about about you, Rosie.
Year one, I was so worried about. All of the logistical things that I didn't actually sit in any sessions, like literally was not present at any sessions this year. I like made my own agenda in the app for the first time and like went and sat and participated in the sessions and. I experienced just a little bit of magic around, like, I hear April talk, I'm gonna go sit with April on a, in a small table, and for 20, 30 minutes just have a discussion with her, given the context of that case study.
So I'm excited about like, how do we make every single session like that next time? [00:29:00]
April Yi: Yeah. I would say that was similar to the session that I emceed, um, on open source for the space and how people are leveraging it. Like again, this session was also focused on real case studies of what people have done and successfully implemented and.
The design of this one was also slightly different. When I chatted with Brad about, you know, preparing for the session, he was thinking, he threw the concept of what if we had some demos of these open source tools? Because the beauty of open source is that it's available to anyone and everyone, and you can use it in all these different ways.
And I said, yeah, I think that's a great idea, great idea. And we iterated on a few different versions of it, and that was exactly what came of it. Everybody had a six minute teaser to present what they used and how they used it, and the [00:30:00] context in which it would be applicable. And then we set up demo tables for each of them to have deeper conversations about what they presented that resonated and spoke to the attendees.
And they could also see it or ask prompt questions, and then they could test out, you know, a. Like a test of what they were actually describing. Um, so that was actually really cool. It does, it did require also, again, a little more prep out of these session speakers, so huge kudos to them, uh, for participating in humoring that concept.
Um, but that was exactly, there was a lot of, there were rich conversations that came out of that and ideas, I think.
James Dice: Cool. And when people go to the recordings on that one, that one's called the Nerds Toolbox, so that, that'll be able to check that one out. Um, I did wanna ask you related to the I it OT track since you spent so much time in there.[00:31:00]
Um, one of the things that we announced at the end of Nexus Con is that we're gonna be doing what we're calling a Nexus cast, which is like a half day, three quarters of a day event focused on the it o OT track. Only, and that's gonna be coming up on December 10th for people that wanna, wanna, um, grab a ticket and, you know, put it on your calendar.
Uh, we'll be sending out more information about that. But April, I wanted to ask you, um, this is our, our little bit of research before we put together the sessions for that, given the track that you participated in there and the different sessions, whether it be open source or network visibility, et cetera.
What do you think, and I'm just springing this on you, you don't know that I'm gonna ask you this, but what do you think in that track, what are the owners that are thinking about OT and cybersecurity and networking? Um, what should we include? Like what are the, the, the problems that are sort of top, top of mind for that track right now for the people in that [00:32:00] track?
April Yi: I think really it's about also, I'm gonna borrow another line from Mike Province that he presented in and. Expose myself. I am not the nerd you're looking for. Um, but with that being said, my personal observations and perspective would be for owners. They may not know the. Impact the operational cost, labor burden, impact of the type of systems they put into their buildings.
Especially as an owner, because you're life cycling your systems at different points of, you know, their various life cycles. And based on how, two things, based on what they put in and the scopes that they receive, how were the providers? Building out their architecture, like that's a big difference. Are they home [00:33:00] runs in your OT or are they daisy chained?
Which takes a lot more maintenance and a lot more burden, and a lot more like monitoring of systems and downtime. And the other aspect is when, when you implement a system or a solution. How is your ops team going? Like how are they going to operate the building and like see that building? So again, you might have all these solutions that you're like, okay, let's do this.
And have special lighting systems, or they're gonna bring in occupancy sensors or you know, even their like WAP systems, but they put all this in and then if they don't have a way to see how it's architected and overlaid on one another, it kind of goes back to what happened. Nobody integrated it incorrectly, but all of that traffic, like is that operator, the people who are running your [00:34:00]facilities.
What are they going to experience with all of the decisions that you're making based on either lowest cost or, you know, best relationship or service? Love it, whatnot.
James Dice: Love it. Okay. Thank you for that input. Uh, we hope to see you there. Um, we're gonna, our team is challenged over the next few weeks and months with trying to take the magic of Nexus Con and, and making it happen online in a, in a day or two or a half day.
Um. It's not the full magic. There's no way that we could possibly, no way replace, replace the in person case. But just like, can we get close to it, asymptotically or something? Um, alright, let's end this with some carve outs. Um, Rosie, I'm gonna make you go first. What you, my goodness.
Rosy Khalife: Why that's not the order in the outline.
How dare you. Okay. Carve out, um. Well, uh, this is gonna be a food [00:35:00] one because apparently that's what I'm known for, uh, as James said already in, uh, when we were getting started with the podcast. So I've been into different kinds of salt lately, which is a little bit random. But anyways, I love. Uh, flaky salt car
James Dice: carve outs are meant to be random.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, good. Well, I love flaky salt, and there's a whole world of flaky salt. Yes. As you may or may not know, and so you can, so there's some that are, you know, flavored that are artificially flavored, so we're not talking about those. But the ones that are. Not artificially flavored like um, ones that have like lemon zest and you can make 'em yourself.
And so I've made lemon zest, just lemon zest and salt and you put it in a little thing and then you use that so good. Um, celery salt, which is basically like celery seeds with salt. It's really nice. Um, so I've been getting into like making flavored salt and it's so random, but it's really adds a kick to whatever you're making and it's so fun.
And I have these like [00:36:00] little. You know little jars of my kitchen and you would think I'm like a mad scientist. So anyways, highly recommend those that are listening. Give it a try. It's easy to do. There's a bunch of different ways of doing it. It's not a lot of work and it's actually adds a lot of fun to your meal.
James Dice: That's awesome.
Rosy Khalife: Thank you.
James Dice: Yeah. Um, I'll go next. Um, mine is my girlfriend, Becca and I were crazy enough to adopt a puppy on the day after Nexus gone. Oh my God. Which I regret heavily, um, because of, you know, the not, I don't regret the doing it, the timing of it is what I regret. Um, you know, the three weeks probably before Nexus Connor.
Very intense. And then, so then to then add that into. Puppy, puppy land, uh, has been a, a weird transition, but we would've had to wait, I think three more weeks. Like we were already attached to this puppy via FaceTime, and we decided that we loved her. And so we would've had to wait for three more [00:37:00] weeks if we wouldn't have got her on the day after next.
That's awesome. And so just the timing of it. So I'm currently in like, how do I raise a puppy? How do I train a puppy land? Um, it's a
Rosy Khalife: whole thing.
James Dice: So if anyone listening to this wants to send me some tips, I, you know the one thing about tips is everyone disagrees with everybody else. So like you That's right.
Learn something about training and then you go to the next person that's like, don't do it like that. Do it like this. And I'm just like a little bit overwhelmed right now. Yeah.
April Yi: Rabbit holes everywhere.
James Dice: Rabbit holes. So many rabbit holes. Yeah. So we have a trainer raising children. We have a lifesaver trainer.
Yeah. Similar probably. Totally. We have a lifesaver trainer that we're expecting to save our life. She comes to our house tomorrow, so
Rosy Khalife: isn't that funny when we like put all of our quite literal eggs and hope and dreams and the one person you're like, save me.
James Dice: That's, that's exactly where I'm at right now.
She's gonna come into our house and, and Becca and I are gonna be like. Help us. We're depending on you. My other [00:38:00] carve out is I had, um, Jacob Jackson who attended the conference, uh, handed me this book that he published called Smart Buildings by Design, how The Fourth Trade Connects It All With the Purdue Model.
I have not opened this book yet, but thank you Jacob for bringing it, bringing me a copy That's awesome. At the conference.
Rosy Khalife: That is awesome. Yeah. Shout out to Jacob.
April Yi: Yeah. Um, okay. Okay. April, you're up. Uh, my carve out, I was inspired by the term carve out, so I am a skier and sailboat hobbyist, and so that's actually how my husband and I met actually racing sailboats, and we had a once in a lifetime opportunity to race a regatta circuit championship.
In the British Virgin at the end of this month with our really, really good sailing friends and we can't wait to it all. But mostly the party,
Rosy Khalife: but also the, that is so fun. [00:39:00] Is this like an organized effort? Like can we google this thing that you're doing or is not really Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's it called?
April Yi: Uh, it's called, oh gosh, the, they changed their names, but if you look up Sailing World. Okay. Regattas, what is it? SW And where is It's in BC you said.
Rosy Khalife: It's in the bvs oh B. Okay. Yeah. Vir Virgin Islands. Got it. Okay. Yeah, I'm thinking of British Columbia 'cause Ainsley lives there and so that's, that's just, that's where my head's at these days.
Right, right, right. That's so cool.
James Dice: Pic tropics area. Yeah.
April Yi: Tropical place. Yeah. The end coming from Pacific Northwest. It'll be a welcome relief from the Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited
Rosy Khalife: for you to do that. Yeah, that's awesome. I hope you post a photo. Good luck with that. Have a blast.
James Dice: Thanks. Thanks. Well, April, thanks for taking the time this week, busy week and, and sharing your, uh, reflections.
Appreciate you.
April Yi: Thank you for Thank you so much for having me.[00:40:00]
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends, thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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This is a great piece!
I agree.