🎧 #201: How Amazon is pulling sustainability into design and construction for their 800M sqft portfolio
Welcome to Nexus Labs, the home for the Connected Buildings Ecosystem—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus Labs, sign up for our Connected Buildings Briefing, a 5-minute briefing on the people, tools, and playbooks changing how buildings run. Delivered every two weeks to 8,000+ building professionals.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest minds in the industry.
Nexus Labs runs an annual conference, NexusCon, and a quarterly virtual conference series, NexusCast.
Episode 201 is a conversation with Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs and Niharika Kishore from Amazon.
Summary
This episode explores how Amazon is integrating energy efficiency and sustainability into the design, construction, and renovation of its massive 800 million square-foot real estate portfolio. Niharika Kishore shares how her team evolved from optimizing existing building operations to implementing standardized energy conservation measures across 40–50 sites annually, up from just 10–12. The conversation dives into how Amazon scales these initiatives through standardized scopes, outcome-based contracting, commissioning, and centralized warranty tracking. They also unpack key lessons for organizations of any size, including how to scale impact by narrowing scope, managing the full project lifecycle, and systematically applying lessons learned. It’s a practical look at how to turn sustainability goals into repeatable, measurable results across a large building portfolio.
Mentions and Links
- Subscribe to the Connected Buildings Briefing: https://www.nexuslabs.online/
- Become a Nexus Pro member: https://www.nexuslabs.online/pro
- Sign up for NexusCast #4: https://www.nexuslabs.online/nexuscast-4
Highlights
Introduction (0:00)
At the Nexus (1:30)
Rapid Fire Context Setting (4:17)
Where Niharika began with Amazon - Sustainability (9:03)
Where Niharika is now with Amazon - Portfolios manager (28:21)
Carve Outs (50:27)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S800157-16073.
Full transcript
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!
Brad Bonavida: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Nexus Podcast Playbook series, where we dive into the weeds with building owners and operators about the playbooks they are running to achieve connected buildings outcomes. This episode is for energy managers, sustainability managers, and capital projects teams who are focused on creating the best buildings possible while meeting the energy and sustainability goals they have.
Today, we're digging into Amazon's energy program, specifically from the lens of Niharika Kishore, who's played multiple energy-related roles over the last six years. This podcast is also great for commissioning agents, it's great for general contractors, master systems integrators, and anyone who supports large organizations like Amazon with massive portfolios and lots of energy usage And quick note, if you're trying to stay on top of the space without wading through vendor noise, we write a short newsletter.
It's called "The Connected Buildings Briefing." It's about a five-minute breakdown of what's worth paying attention to. It's read by over 9,000. We send it out every other Wednesday, and you can grab it in the show notes if you wanna sign up. My name is Brad Bonavita. I'm the head of product at [00:01:00] Nexus Labs, and today I'm joined by Niharika Kishore, senior portfolios manager of worldwide operations at Amazon.
Niharika, how are you doing today?
Niharika Kishore: Good. Very excited to talk to you all.
Brad Bonavida: Me too. I'm very happy to have you. You and I have been working on scheduling this now for, like, four months, so we made it happen. We worked through the logistics. Um, so buckle up and enjoy, everybody, as we get into the complexity of energy and sustainability in one of the largest corporate real estate portfolios on the planet, over 800 million square feet.
Before we get into the full conversation here about Amazon's portfolio, we're gonna start with At the Nexus, which is just where we review what's going on with Nexus Labs. Uh, the biggest thing is this is our first podcast since Nexus Con 2026. Uh, it's a wrap. Uh, you were there, Niharika. What did you enjoy about the event?
What did you think? I know you, you, you had a short amount of time there 'cause you had some, some family stuff going on, but what'd you think?
Niharika Kishore: I think my most favorite takeaway was, um, meeting a lot of old friends, colleagues, and industry contacts, [00:02:00] uh, from the previous years, um, and deepening those relationships, and then also meeting a lot of new companies and new people and, uh, new grads coming into, uh, the sustainability energy construction space, which is very exciting, uh, to hear their new perspective.
Uh, so it was, it was a good takeaway from that.
Brad Bonavida: Great. Yeah, you presented this year, which we'll be diving into, and last year. Um, and speaking of those presentations, w-we are just about to release all the recordings from, uh, all of this year's presentations. So that's over 50 different recordings. Uh, there's 16 product demos in there.
And you got-- These are the, you know... We, we got tons of abstract applications of people who wanted to speak, and this is the cream of the crop, the people that we actually selected who had really good stories to share. So, um, I'm really excited for those to come out. They're gonna be available, uh, at the beginning of November.
We'll send out an email the day that they're, you know, immediately released, but it's gonna be, you know, within a week here. Um, it'll be-- They'll be released when people are listening to this podcast. These [00:03:00] are for Nexus Pro members, so if you're not a Pro member, please check that out. Uh, it's only $350 a year, and it gets you access to all Nexus Con recordings, so all the ones from this year and last year and the year before.
It gets you our Smart Buildings Awareness course, which is, like, a six-hour course that kind of gets people up to speed really fast on the things that we talk about It gives you access to the Nexus Marketplace, which is where we've categorized over 900 different vendors of-- with what they do for building owners and operators.
And then it gives you unlimited access to our virtual event series, Nexus Cast. Speaking of Nexus Cast, we do have one of those coming up as well, which is kind of the next event that Nexus Labs is doing. It's on technology-enabled and outcome-based services, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit here and what that means to you at Amazon.
Um, but that's December 9th. It's from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM Eastern Time. It's completely virtual. We try to run it just like we run a Nexus Con session. So if you've heard about Nexus Con or you're curious, we try to do the same thing virtually, which means it's not just a webinar. We've got a lot of [00:04:00]roundtable discussions.
We've got demos. We've got a ton of different where-- areas where you're gonna be actually talking to the people that are in the room, w- or the virtual room, I suppose, with, um, this topic and what it means to you. So you can sign up for that as well. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Okay. That's the, uh, update.
So let's get into this. Um, first I love to do just rapid fire context setting so people know a little bit more about why you're on the pod, who you are, and what we're gonna talk about Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your professional background and how you got to where you are today?
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. Um, so I was really inspired by "The Inconvenient Truth" by, um, Al Gore. Uh, when that, when that documentary came out, it kind of shattered my whole world on what am I gonna do when I grow up. And so that got me interested in climate change, sustainability, energy efficiency, and those kind of things. Uh, started some grassroot campaigns in my, um, high school, um, as well as my, uh, where I used to stay, so my, uh, my residential, uh, place of living.
Uh, started some, [00:05:00] uh, rainwater harvesting, uh, for, for the 20 houses that were in my, uh, in my colony. Um, started a lot of tea plantation drives and just, you know, chatting with, uh, friends and, uh, uh, different classmates in school on what is sustainability and why is it important. Um, from there, went on to get a bachelor's in renewable energy engineering.
Um, when I completed-- When I was in my third year of engineering studies, I had two paths in front of me. One was getting into research and development, uh, which meant researching solar cells, how do we make them more efficient, um, other forms of renewable energy, wind, tidal, wave, um, hydroelectric, so on. Um, the other path in front of me was actually figuring out how do we implement renewable energy in urban space.
Um, so I chose the latter. Uh, went in for my master's in sustainable urban planning, uh, which was centered around, um, installing renewable energy in buildings. What made me really curious was that 85% of the buildings that humans need have already been built, uh, which [00:06:00] means we need to make them more efficient versus building new, uh, buildings.
And so that was my focus, retrofitting existing buildings, um, energy efficiency, retro commissioning. Uh, so that's the kind of, uh, formal studies I went through in my master's. Uh, worked on campus in various roles as teaching assistant, re-research assistant. Uh, worked for a, a center called the Smart Energy Design and Assistant Center, which was our, um, incubator of sustainability ideas on campus.
So we used to do a lot of energy efficiency commissioning work for, uh, buildings in Illinois. And from there, uh, I worked with an engineering firm out of Nashville for about four years, um, as a sustainability consultant. Um, did a bunch of, uh, green building rating system consulting, so LEED, WELL, Fitwel, ILFI.
You name it, I've done it. Um, and then a lot to do with energy efficiency in terms of energy audits, commissioning, energy modeling. Anything that touched energy, water [00:07:00] waste in buildings, that was my focus in that role. From there, I decided to join Amazon. And as, and as a consultant, I would work with one client on one project, which was a tiny aspect, um, of sustainability.
Um, I wanted to make the leap of working cross-functionally across multiple buildings so that I could maximize the impact Um, that I could have in decarbonizing, uh, the built environment. So I got hired by Amazon as a program manager for sustainability, built out Amazon's first existing building sustainability program, um, aimed at energy efficiency retrofits.
Helped certify, uh, the first, uh, fulfillment center with ILFI Zero Carbon. Helped design and launch, uh, North America's first and second largest CO2 refrigeration, uh, warehouses. Um, launched Amazon's first water efficiency program targeted to reduce, um, energy used in our flushes, in our wash basins and so on.
Launched Amazon's first ambassadors program, which was aimed at [00:08:00]exciting sites and the associates about sustainability so they could start owning their metrics, uh, for waste and energy, um, at their sites. Did a lot of those cool things, uh, for Amazon first while, uh, Amazon was still s- figuring out what...
how do we meet the Climate Pledge goals, and I know we're gonna talk about that, uh, in a bit. Um, and then currently, uh, I work in the worldwide operations team, which, uh, where I focus on special projects. So anything that doesn't follow a regular design and construction process kind of falls in my lap to figure out how to execute, uh, most of which are sites that we're already operating out of, um, so how do we retrofit them, uh, while we're continuing our operations.
Um, so that's my current focus with a lens of sustainability on it.
Brad Bonavida: Sweet. That's great. We're, we're very happy to have you on the implementation side of the industry. I'm glad you made that decision way back when instead of research, selfishly. We're ha- look, I don't... The amount of times you said, "I launched, I was involved in," you're, you're out, [00:09:00]you're one of those people actually out there making it work, so thank you.
Um, yeah, so a lot of people are familiar with the Amazon Climate Pledge, but when we start these, these podcasts, I always like to really get down to, like, what are the business outcomes that really drives your role? So You're in sustainability, you're in energy. What does that mean for Amazon? What's the ultimate goal?
Like, you can, you know, I-- you mentioned the Climate p- Pledge. Maybe a little bit more on that or whatever else there is that's driving Amazon and drives your work specifically.
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. So Amazon's main goal is, uh, achieving net zero carbon by 2040. We call it the Climate Pledge. We also urge other companies to sign with us.
Uh, we were the co-founders for the Climate Pledge. Um, but this could mean very different things for Amazon businesses. Amazon is one company, but it almost o- operates as multiple startups within it. Um, so net zero by 2040 for a data center means reducing the energy use in data centers, offsetting because we obviously can't, uh, go down to zero energy.
Um, it's hard to even have on-site renewable energy [00:10:00] to support all of the energy needs, uh, for a data center. So- Yeah ... offsets green, uh, green power is, is what that team would work on. And reducing the amount of water we're using to cool the data centers. Um, for grocery, it means reducing food waste, uh, agriculture sustainability, um, transportation related sustain, uh, emissions, uh, from transporting food from one place to the other, for growing the food, um, in, in our agriculture networks.
It also means, to some extent, um, buildings energy efficiency, um, though it's a smaller component, um, for grocery. Um, for retail, it is really everything under the sun from buildings to transportation to shipping, aviation fuel, um, manufacturers. So when you get into products, it's gonna be our embodied carbon that we're using on the materials to build the products.
And then the fourth is our office spaces, which is gonna be more towards, um, recycling on site, um, energy used by the buildings and the equipment [00:11:00] within our office spaces and so on. So every different vertical within Amazon has their own sustainability teams that are translating what the Climate Pledge means for their business, setting goals, uh, that they can help achieve, and then building strategies towards achieving those goals with glide paths on what is the best way to, um, get to the Climate Pledge.
So that's what it really means for Amazon. Depends on which, which part of the business you're in.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. I, I'm gonna... I, I'm always trying to put my, my mind in the perspective of a listener who has the same role, and it's probably a lot of energy managers and sustainability managers who are in smaller portfolios than you because you have base- one of the largest portfolios in the world.
So my question that I would imagine that they might be thinking is, everything you said there is so sustainability driven, carbon emissions. How is Amazon thinking about just like the operating costs as well? If you're reducing energy, you're probably saving operating costs at, uh, you know, as well, and that's what I think a lot of these smaller portfolios are thinking of.
Do [00:12:00] you guys even bring those KPIs and metrics into the work that you do, or is it a separate group?
Niharika Kishore: It really depends on the business and what the percentage of Energy bills is, um, uh, is a percent of the revenue for that business. For AWS, it's a big percent. Yeah. We're spending a lot on just the electricity that we're using, um, to cool, cool the sites down, to run- Sure
the data centers and so on. Um, for grocery it's big in terms of, um, it's not as big but big-ish in terms of the energy use in the buildings, the stores. Uh, but the, the bigger cost is the growing the food. Um, so the money- Yeah ... we're putting in the fertilizers, the money we're putting in, uh, the organics, um, lines, uh, that we're setting up, uh, for the food, um, and so on.
So it really depends on which, what it means for each of the different businesses, um, and as a percentage of revenue. Um, with that saying, um, any money that we save, [00:13:00] um, introducing operating costs is money we can invest to further sustainability goals. Uh, money is finite even for a company like Amazon. Uh, we still do have a really hard time getting approvals with, for projects we wanna do.
Um, and just sharing some examples for buildings, the biggest challenge is we lease our buildings. Um, these leases could be anywhere from 5 to 20 years, uh, three to five years being the typical norm. Now, there's only so many sustainability initiatives that you can put in a building that will pay back within three to five years.
Embodied carbon initiatives themselves have paybacks of over 10 years. So it's a very hard sell to leadership to actually get us, get, give us approvals, uh, to put a lot of the good projects, uh, which are expensive. So car- uh, low carbon concrete is expensive. Timber roofing is expensive. So these are projects that we first have to pilot proof of concept and then get in- Yeah
kind of approvals for scaling. Um, so any money that we can save from the, the operating [00:14:00] expenses is money that is available for us to put back, um- Nice ... in, in the bank to implement new projects. That could mean having 20 more sites with BMSs. That could mean, um, having or setting up a recycling and donations program at 100 more sites.
Um, so, so that, uh, when you look at it that way, it's a huge impact. So even if we're saving, um, just a couple of hundred thousand dollars or a couple of millions, that could mean a big impact, um, in some of the other initiatives in other areas of sustainability, uh, other than just energy.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. That's great.
Yeah, I've, I've seen that approach. We did a podcast with Weaver State, and it just seems like when, when energy managers are allowed to reinvest the money that they're saving, it creates this flywheel that really gets people moving and gets the, the motivation and the ambition and just the quality of work there.
Okay, cool. So I want to, uh, segue kind of into, I wanted to kind of talk about your career at Amazon as an arc because [00:15:00] When you presented at Nexus Con last year in 2025, you were in the energy management track and you had a-- an, I mean, you're still energy management focused, but you had a different job then.
And this year when you talked at, uh, Nexus Con, you were in the construction track. So can you first remind me what your previous title was, and then explain to the audience what the difference between the two roles is?
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. So my previous title was, um, senior sustainability specialist, um, where I was identifying, um, for Walmart Grocery.
Um, so I was on the grocery side of the house before this. Um, identifying what sustainability and energy efficiency, uh, meant for grocery org specifically, and how do we translate, um, the climate pledge, uh, for Walmart Grocery in their buildings. So I was on the buildings energy efficiency portion of it on the existing building side, which is buildings we're currently operating out of, which was over 500, um, at the time.
Um, and then figuring out how do we reduce their [00:16:00] energy, um, energy usage. How do we, uh, meet all of the All of the mini goals, micro goals that come under the climate pledge, uh, for those businesses. Um, in that role, um, I expanded the existing buildings program that I built in the role before that, um, for grocery, uh, which meant to do a lot with, uh, refrigeration retrofits, um, HVAC retrofits.
Refrigeration was about 40 to 50% of our energy use per building. Um, HVAC was a close second at about 30%. Everything else was lumped into one. We already had LED lighting, um, in all of our buildings. So our really big levers for, uh, energy efficiency were refrigeration and HVAC. Now, um, anyone that's in this business knows grocery is not a very high margin business.
Uh, we were leasing buildings, so three to five-year leases. Um, no- with no line of sight whether that building is gonna get renewed, um, in terms of leasing. Um, and so I had to [00:17:00] find, like, the lowest cost, no-cost measures to help us reduce bills. Um, so refrigeration, tweaking certain things like defrost temperatures, um, ramping up and down on refrigeration cycles, um, installing air curtains so our refrigerated air isn't just leaking out of the freezers.
Um, simple projects like those actually led us to about a 20% efficiency increase, um, in, in our systems with bills, um, reducing significantly risk and safety reducing, um, significantly because we were able to reduce the amount of condensate that was happening, uh, in our buildings.
Brad Bonavida: And these are, this is all in operating buildings that
Niharika Kishore: people are- Oh, these are fully operational buildings.
There's 24/7. Yeah. So the warehousing part of this business is 24/7, which means we can't obviously shut down anything in the building. Um, if we wanna do any work, we have to get backup generators on the site, which was a whole other expensive headache, uh, w- for a low margin business. Yeah. Um, so, so my [00:18:00] mandate was im- uh, implementing initiatives without shutting anything down, without operating any...
without disrupting any operations, uh, without having to get any additional permits or permissions from landlords or Utilities or jurisdictions or anything else. Basically operating as Amazon Business as usual within a building, but still trying to save energy. Yeah. Um, so I played around a lot with set points, um, and a lot of pilots, a lot of failures, a lot of successes after those failures.
Uh, but there was a lot of trial and error to figure out what would be a good project at scale, uh, for these fully operational buildings.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about, uh, the, the M&V aspect of that? Specifically, when you've got a building that's operating, you do not have a constrained experiment where it's easy to tell, like, you know, we switched one variable, how did it, how did it go?
So how are you dealing with proving your energy savings through some sort of M&V while [00:19:00] the building is still doing a million other things?
Niharika Kishore: Yes. So very good question. Um, and M&V is the reason our program was actually successful and was able to scale from, um, 10 buildings to 50 buildings to 500 buildings.
Um Anyone that's operating out of a building knows that things keep changing. Um, I would go in and tweak the temperature set point, set it back a couple of degrees when there are fewer people in the buildings at night, uh, and do all of those things while the operations team would just go and add another refrigerator in the building.
And so when we started looking at bills, we were like, "Why are we not saving energy?" Um, so that was used to be the first question that the operations team would ask me like, "You're doing all of this work in our buildings. We're not-- Our bills are going up. What are you guys doing?" And so I had to literally sit down with the operations team for a month and point out, "You just added two new refrigerators to your building.
Here is how much load that is. This is X percent of your [00:20:00] bill. Um, you just added all of this shelving, which means now you've got all of this extra product in the building that we need to cool down and yada, yada." So I had to sit with them and explain that every action of the operations team had a consequence in terms of energy.
No matter how much work I did, unless you don't do anything in your building, it's, it's very hard for me to say, um, how much energy my program is saving. That was one conversation. The other was, um, I looked towards data science and the engineering teams and we're like, "If we're putting in dock shelters in a building, we know exactly how much air is now not leaking out.
Can we put CFMs around that? And then can we put math around it in terms of how much air leakage we're saving, which means how much less air do we need to condition? Can we convert that into kilowatt hours and say, 'Here's how much energy we saved equal to this is the dollar saving we have, uh, per month.'
If this initiative remains applied to your building, which means the dock shelter is working as it is." We've got sensors around that. We plugged [00:21:00]sensor data, um, into that for downtime. Um, so anytime the, the dock shelters went down, we said, "Okay, for so many hours the shelter was down, which means we didn't save this energy."
And so at the end of this, we had a math that could tell us, um, in an entire year how much energy we, we saved for each of those initiatives. So we built guardrails around every initiative like that. So for the low-flow plumbing fixtures, it was we're gonna use so much less water, which means our water heaters are gonna have to run so much less, which means here's how much energy we're saving.
So we started putting math around all of these initiatives with sensors, uh, and put it on a dashboard, uh, to show us whether the initiative is working or not working, and then auto-calculate how much energy we're saving if the initiative is on.
Brad Bonavida: Nice. What was that technology that you mentioned for s- saving the dock?
That's for, uh, keeping the air in the building or I'm not
Niharika Kishore: familiar with that technology. Yeah, so it's like dock shelters. Um, typically, um, on the grocery, in grocery buildings, you've got these big, uh, the dock doors are sized to the big trucks, [00:22:00] the trailer trucks. Mm-hmm. Uh, but sometimes we've got like these box trucks and smaller trucks that are stationed in those really big dock doors, which means there was a lot of conditioned air from a refrigerated building- Ah
leaking out. And so we added some curtains, we added some dock levelers so that when a smaller truck- I see ... is standing at the, uh, the dock door, we're not leaking, um, unnecessary air, um, out of the building. Gotcha.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. One, one more question I think on your last role is I, I wanna talk about kind of the, the people aspect of it.
It sounds like you were in a, what could be a difficult position of you are part of this energy group who's coming in to save energy and sustainability, and you're coming into somebody's building, this maintenance operations team who's trying to fix things and keep the building operating, and their job is already hard, and here comes in your team like, "Ah, we're gonna change a bunch of things to save the energy."
How did you maintain those relationships or how do you get those people on board to support you and not feel like you're, you know, a pain in their butt that you have to come in here and do this stuff?
Niharika Kishore: The first thing was [00:23:00] actually hearing them and their problems. My first 30 days on the job was really just calling up the facility managers for these sites and talking to them on what issues are you facing in your building.
Um, one common thread that came out of that was we obviously don't have enough resources. No company will ever have enough resources to do anything they-- everything they really wanna do. Um, so they were resource-constrained, but the other problem was that they had no way of telling what's breaking in their buildings.
These teams were so bandwidth-constrained that they were reacting to things breaking down versus proactively maintaining. So which meant in a twenty-four/seven warehouse, we're in peak summer, we've got all of these Prime Days going on. We've got two hundred additional people, pickers, in these buildings working as temp workers, and suddenly your air conditioning stops working.
Um, and [00:24:00] that's when the facility manager would get a call. There would be severity one tickets, uh, that would be really expensive fixes. Um, so we called them truck rolls. So the truck rolls are mechanical vendors coming in on site last minute on an emergency basis, which typically costs you two X of what it would had you proactively planned maintenance for your site, um, and, and made sure that these systems are properly maintained.
Um, so the first-- that was the first issue I found was that everyone reacting to stuff already breaking down, which meant that everybody's scrambling, uh, to figure out how to fix it so we don't lose productivity or product in, in... For grocery, that was a huge thing. We had millions of dollars worth of product inside these buildings, um, that we would have to throw away, um, if systems weren't working as they should.
That was problem number one. Um, the second problem was I sat with the operations team and the facilities team. Operations team are working in the building. Facilities team are supporting them to make sure their building is [00:25:00] functional. Um, I sat with them to identify the initiatives that they From the get-go, they knew that we're not gonna be pushing initiatives down their throats.
It's more like we're gonna develop these initiatives with them that actually solve the problems that they're having. So it was one friction less for us to, um, get approvals. Um, so I sat with them to develop the... First figure out what the problems in their buildings were. A lot of them were our flushes keep leaking, our building's really old, um, our mechanical systems keep failing.
Our refrigeration systems is doubling up as, uh, dehumidifiers because our mechanical systems don't have dehumidifiers on them, and those kind of things. So, so I heard all of them and I'm like, "Okay, here's a list of initiatives that I think would be a really good fit for these kind of buildings." Um, so that's how the existing buildings program actually got developed.
It was a grounds-up approach. Like, I went to these sites, I audited a couple of them, spoke to all of these, um, um, all of the operators and the operations [00:26:00] teams, um, and then came up with a list of initiatives, put guardrails around those initiatives, developed their costs and budgets, and then went to leadership with, "Here's the white paper, here's all the research.
We need so much money to pilot in 10 buildings. Can we do it?" Um, so then it was a much easier sell because we're-- at that point, we were not thinking of initiatives in a silo and then working with them to implement. It was the other way around. Like, they told us, "Here's what needs to be fixed." We were gonna do that in a more energy efficient way.
Um, so that's how- That's awesome ... that, that work started.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. That's seems like maybe the most important takeaway someone else should take from this is- ... aligning your energy incentives and ener- or energy initiatives with things that are a problem for maintenance and operations gets everybody going in the same direction compared to just a- Yeah
siloed energy project that they don't see how it helps them with maintenance. That's-
Niharika Kishore: Yeah ...
Brad Bonavida: that's great.
Niharika Kishore: And I've had my fair share of calls with- Mm-hmm ... with, um, operations [00:27:00] team calling me up, "You put a BMS in my building, my HVAC is not working anymore. My T-stat's not working." And I'm like, "The only reason you know your T-stat's not working is because we put the BMS in-"
and now it's telling us it's not working." Yeah. "Otherwise, you wouldn't know that the temperature set point in your building is not being met." Um, and so there was a lot of those educational, um, conversations and, uh, trainings as well on when I put a BMS in your building, here's what it means. I'm not taking control away from you, I'm giving you extra visibility into stuff that might break down on your side so we can- Yeah
proactively start maintaining. So it was a lot of, um, a lot of training and a lot of conversation, um, in a non-confrontational way that- Yeah ... we're doing- Yeah ... we're doing this to help you. Here's how it's gonna help you. Once they start understanding that, then that's how I became the single-threaded leader then for all of Amazon, uh, for BMS questions.
Like, other teams outside of grocery would then want to have a meeting to understand how grocery [00:28:00] got approval to put 500 BMSs in while retail hasn't been able to do that in five years. And so it was, it was this whole strategy of grounds up working with them to figure out and then training them on here's what this data is telling you and how it's useful for you.
Brad Bonavida: Yep. That's awesome. Okay, so let's, let's kind of transition. You're, you're, you're still dri- in your new role, you're still driving at the same business outcomes. You're still focused on the Climate Pledge, et cetera, but now you're on the construction capital projects side of that. Explain, explain, you know, you just did a really good job of what your old job was.
How has this transitioned and what, what are you doing now?
Niharika Kishore: So it was all about ti- it's all about timing. So my old job, I joined Amazon in 2021. We were just two years into signing the Climate Pledge, uh, which meant we were still figuring out what strategy needs to be, what these programs need to be. So that's what I built in my previous role.
But that was already now built, right? So we already have an existing buildings program, now we've got an ambassadors program, we've got a water efficiency program, we've got a [00:29:00] zero waste program, and so on. Um, so I now wanted to transfer over on the more, on the heavy execution side, construction side of actually making sure these practices are getting practiced.
Um, so having programs in place is one thing, but actually implementing them, uh, across scale is a whole other thing. Um, so for, for this role, I was focusing specifically on special projects, which meant anything that does not follow a typical design and construction timeline. And when I say typical design and construction timeline, I meant you think of a project, you go through the design process, you get design documents, you engage with the, uh, architects and engineers, walk the...
You, you, you figure out, build the energy models or the digital twins to figure out what this building might look like. You then transfer over to the pre-construction team who actually does the permitting, um, setting up the RFP for GCs and that process, and then the construction process where you contract with the GCs to actually build the building.
This is a typical [00:30:00] process. Um, retrofits, um, adding stuff to existing buildings, expanding existing buildings does not follow this typical process. Sometimes you need a permit, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you need three different GCs on the site just based on how specialized the project is. Um, and so anything, any of these special projects come to our team.
I specialize on the retrofit side of it specifically based on my, uh, prior experience at Amazon on how do we How do we retrofit buildings when we're operating out of them? So we're already in a building with 1,000 associates. We wanna redo all of the restrooms. So how do you do that? I mean, it's, it's one thing, shut the building and then we'll retrofit everything in two months and go back in.
But that's-- we can't do that at Amazon. Our operations have to continue. Um, so my job is to carefully work with our internal teams to first come up with the design, uh, make sure that we're meeting all of our internal design standards and practices, our specifications. [00:31:00] Um, I act as the, uh, owner's rep and the commissioning agent both on, on these projects, which means that I champion, um, uh, whoever's asking for the program, I champion all of their requirements.
Um, and then I champion all of our sustainability requirements on the projects as commissioning agent, just to make sure that, um, our standard specifications, if it calls for low-flow plumbing fixtures, that's what's going into the design actually. Um, so I act as that, that lens, um, on these programs. And then I work with the GCs on execution, um, and then with construction managers at their particular sites.
Now, what I really wanna highlight is I'm not a construction manager. I'm a construction program manager, which means that construction managers provide this vertical visibility at their site. There could be multiple programs running at their sites, um, from retrofits to, um, adding different kind of shelving, uh, to changing out some of the robotics fittings, to adding [00:32:00]more material handling equipment at their sites, whatever else.
There's multiple things that are happening at each site. The construction manager manages the day-to-day on the site. I, as a program manage- construction program manager, manage the horizontal. There's 50 sites that are getting, um restroom refreshes, I will manage all of those 50 sites to make sure we're meeting all of our, uh, budgets, we're meeting our schedules, we're meeting our risk tolerance, we have all the resources we need to execute, and we're meeting all of the sustainability goals across all of these programs.
Because believe it or not, sustainability tends to make it really well when you're building a building from scratch. But when you're retrofitting, you get into all of these micro contracts and microscopes, um, that don't always follow all of the design, uh, specifications and standards. So that's my goal to make sure that even when we're retrofitting, we retrofit to the highest sustainability standards that are in our specifications at this time.
Brad Bonavida: Gotcha. So it's not just about sustain- uh, not that your old, only old [00:33:00] job was only about sustainability, but now you have to look at the whole construction project as a whole. Not only do you want that bathroom retrofit to be more sustainable, you also just need this construction related project to go right.
Like you need the bathrooms to be installed in time in the correct way. Uh, what, when- And
Niharika Kishore: that, that's a, that's an aspect of sustainability. If you go back to the triple bottom line, it's people, planet, profit. Mm-hmm. So my role, this role specifically actually focuses on all three now. The people, because they're the ones that are working in these buildings, so you wanna make sure where they're up to Amazon standards; the planet, because I've got the sustainability lens on it; and profit.
We wanna deliver- Yeah ... these projects within budget and on time, um, so everyone can go about their business happily.
Brad Bonavida: Yep. Explain to me the... One part I don't quite understand yet is, okay, uh, let's just stick with the bathroom refresh as our example. Who decides that the bathroom refresh has to happen? And is that coming from your program or is that the construction manager team who's saying that our site's ready for that?
How, where does that come from?
Niharika Kishore: So there's a team of, [00:34:00] uh, so that's the owner team. So the, the operations leaders in these programs have these surveys that, that, the associate surveys that go out to sites where they gather back feedback from, uh, what kind of improvement sites would like to have. Um, we then sit with that team to prioritize which sites are really in need of refresh, which typically happens to be our oldest sites.
Um, if we're in a building for Over 10 years, there is some kind of refresh work that's needed. These buildings are truly heavily used. Um, and so the restrooms, the break rooms, the conference rooms, the, the, the areas that associates are typically using do need to be refreshed, um, about every 10 years. So the first lens is, um, pick our oldest buildings and then figure out what's the common theme, uh, among, um, the feedback that associates are giving us in terms of what needs to be, uh, upgraded at their sites.
We then start bucketizing, um, that, okay, so there's like 20 sites that need re- [00:35:00] bathroom refresh. There's, like, 30 sites that need, um, conference rooms. There's 50 sites that need break room, and here's what's missing in those break rooms and yada, yada. So we figure out, we bucketize, um, all of the, the feedback that's coming in, and then I sit and design what the program around that should be and how can we...
Do we build this all into one program or should we split it up, uh, or whatever. So we-- Once we've got all of this big scope, I figure out what's gonna be the best way to, uh, put a program guardrail around certain scopes of these and then run it as, uh, a program across multiple sites. And so that's how multiple programs are born.
So BMS retrofits would be one program. The- Yeah ... the refresh program, which is the restrooms, conference rooms, break rooms, um, office spaces is one program. Um, conveyor belts, uh, upgrades is another separate program. It also depends on how complex, uh, these programs might be in terms of the GCs that might need to be on site, the architects, engineers that we might need, um, help with.[00:36:00]
Does a program require design, uh, and permitting and so on. So there's a lot of those other nuances that determine what goes in a program.
Brad Bonavida: Sure. That's, that's probably a good segue. I-I'd like to talk a little bit about the contracting structure, which I know is probably changes for every single one of these.
But when you're looking at an existing building and bringing in sustainability and keeping it connected to everything else that you're got going on in the building, what is your guys' approach to, like, master systems integrator or making sure that whatever you're doing is connecting in with the larger whatever's already going on with the building?
How do you guys think of the MSI role? Where does it sit in the contracting tier? Do these all have MSIs? Are you the MSI? H-How does that part work for you?
Niharika Kishore: It really depends on the different programs. So things like just general restroom, uh, refreshes, uh, you know, interiors refreshing basically, um, that's generic work, right?
Any GC- Yeah ... mostly any GC can, can execute that work. However, when it comes to things like BMS retrofits, [00:37:00] that's highly specialized work, so that would require an MSI. Um, installing generators, again, highly specialized work, requires special permitting. Um, so, so installing permanent generators on site would require a specialized, um, MSI or specialized vendors to, to help us implement that.
So it really depends on the complexity of the project and whether it's in the wheelhouse of that general contractor. Um, typically, if we've already got a GC on site doing one program, we try to slot in the other program within that schedule with the same GC. It, it works out well for them. They get more work, we get better pricing.
Um, and then the construction manager only has to manage the one GC on site and their subs. Uh, versus having multiple GCs on site, multiple vendors on site, kind of becomes like this, um Mixed, mixed chaos, um, on, on site which gets- Yeah ... really hard to manage, uh, from a scheduling and execution perspective.
So it really depends on- Does the, does the M- ... the complexity of the program.
Brad Bonavida: Does the [00:38:00] MSI usually sit underneath the GC or are you guys contracting that role directly to you?
Niharika Kishore: So the... No. So, so the GC sit under the MSI. MSI is gonna be the main, main person, the main team on the site, and then they will bring in their subs for, um, say the electrical work or the mechanical work or plumbing or whatever else.
Brad Bonavida: The GC, yeah, the GC will bring in those, and then the MSI sits outside of those essentially.
Niharika Kishore: So we contract with the MSI, MSI contracts with the GC, GC contracts with the subs. Oh, okay.
Brad Bonavida: I see. Cool. All right, great.
Niharika Kishore: And sometimes for quality control we will have a parallel owner's rep who would then work with the MSI to make sure everything else is, uh, running smoothly.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. That's... I, I always am curious about that part because it seems like there are a lot of different places that you can put the MSI, and maybe I, I'm a little biased from my controls and connected buildings background, but the closer that MSI sits to the owners, the more likely you are to actually get the [00:39:00] outcomes by integrating different systems together that the owners can actually benefit from it seems, so.
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. And we've actually done both ways. We've also done, uh, so we've done sequential contracts like the one I just talked about. We've also done parallel contracts where we, as Amazon, will contract with everyone separately, but that increases a lot of our admin work. It's easy to do that for one program, but if you're running like five programs, um, across 500 sites, it's very hard to be directly contracting with all of these different vendors, managing their invoicing, uh, making sure they're all running on, on, on schedule and budget.
So we prefer to have just one point of contact who can then have all of the contacts so we can-- We manage them, they manage everything else. Um, it does work out cheaper for us to do everything ourselves, but it's also a lot more work for us to do everything. Yeah. Sure. And then sometimes it's higher quality work, sometimes it's not.
I mean, if a program manager's spread really thin, um, there's, there's no way they can manage 500 sites with 50 vendors. Uh, it, it's, it's not possible.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. [00:40:00] That's a probably another good segue into figuring out how these things can all go right at the same time, standardizing the commissioning. Uh, walk us through that.
You've got, you've got dozens and dozens of projects going on at once. H- what are you-- what work are you doing to make sure that you're getting the same quality of work across all those sites?
Niharika Kishore: Um, for me, I've got a very robust lessons learned tracker, um, and that is a living document. Um, it is shared across different programs, so we're sharing from the refresh program to the BMS to others, um, and then also shared across different teams.
So grocery is sharing with retail, um, is, is gonna share with AWS and so on. Um, this lessons learned tracker basically is like a playbook on what can go wrong at your site if you're retrofitting while you're in it. Um, and so every time we run into a roadblock, it becomes, uh, uh, an issue... It's almost like an [00:41:00] issues log.
It becomes an issue on the lessons learned, and then it, it comes down to it explains how we triage that problem. So an example on the BMS program, we needed additional IT drops, and we didn't know that till MSI and the subs were on the site. So on the day of the job when they're supposed to be laying cabling, we realize and we're told that, "Hey, we, by the way, don't have enough bandwidth, so you're gonna need a couple of additional IT drops here."
And that the, the IT team is backlogged by six months because they downsized their team and now we've got these, um, contingent workers that are supporting that team, and then physically the IT team needs to be on the site on the day of data drop, and yeah, they are. This was like a new thing we had no idea of.
Um, so things like that, um, it, it kind of becomes hard to anticipate some of these issues from before if you haven't been on the site, ever done this project before. But when you're on the site and you've learned all of this, it can be [00:42:00] logged so that the next time AWS goes in to put a BMS, they know what Amazon's requirement is for having, um, an, an ID person, an ID drop, and here's the process to do that, um, in case anyone's looking.
So it kind of now beco- has become this lessons learned, um, log where you c- it, it's searchable, so you can search, um, IT drops, and then it's gonna show up where we had this problem, when we had this problem, what the solution was. So I think that is really important to make sure a program or a project is successful, um, at a site.
Does that answer your question?
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, it does. I, I also wanted you to talk a little bit about the commissioning side of it as well in terms of... Well, maybe let's start with the contracting structure of that. Is the commissioning agent underneath the GC? Is it d- report directly to you guys? And what are you getting out of-- how does that process look?
Niharika Kishore: Right now, commissioning is under the GC. We don't want that. Um, it, it, it violates the whole purpose of having commissioning. Like, we want it to be a third party that's independent of [00:43:00] Amazon as well as the GC and any other vendor, so they... Dispassionate third party. Um, that's what we're trying to get to.
We're not quite there yet. Uh, so for now, the commissioning, um, commissioning is under GC contracts. It is required on every project. However, um, commissioning contracts go both ways. Um, it's, it's one thing for Amazon to want commission, to want to commission their buildings and all of these projects. Uh, it's another thing for us to have the infrastructure to receive these reports and actually do something about them, uh, or make sure that we're reading, um, or, or inheriting the reports in the right way.
So every document folder has a commissioning folder. It's got a commissioning report in there. Nobody's actually reading it. Yeah. Um, and so three years down the line when warranties are voided and we suddenly find something's not working on the site, we go back and start looking in the commissioning report, and more than likely we'll find it that it was an issue in the commissioning report.
So we're now trying to work towards having [00:44:00] a solution where once the report is put in, somebody needs to view it. We still have to figure out who that's gonna be, whether that's gonna be the com- the construction team, uh, the construction manager, or whether that's gonna be the energy and sustainability, someone in my role, whether it's gonna be the construction program manager or whatever.
We still haven't, we don't have a perfect answer for who should be reading that report, uh, to make sure we're inheriting what we need to. Um, but it, that's been an issue. Like, our first problem was- Yeah ... we didn't have commissioning. Now we have commissioning. Our second problem is we're not doing anything about commissioning.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Yeah.
Niharika Kishore: Uh, so that's what we wanna solve for now.
Brad Bonavida: I was just gonna say, like, you are just nailing what we're trying to make this next Nexus cast about. So I'm, I, I want you to, um, come and share this perspective there. Specifically, the thing that's jumping out to me that you're saying is someone needs to read this report, and I'm just wondering if we can get to a place in this industry where no one has to read this report.
It's just, like, built into the contracting structure that if the commissioning doesn't pass, like, the, the work's [00:45:00] not done, right? I mean, is that... Are you guys trying to get to a point that, like, the report doesn't have to be read, it's just, it's part of the, the GC and all of their people know that they have to meet some functional testing baseline benchmark to be able to be done with the job?
Niharika Kishore: In theory, yes. In practical, that's not how it's gonna work because the operations team is looking for something very different, which means they want shelving, they want a roof, they want conveyor belts, and they want electricity. That's their requirement. Um, for the engineering team, it's gonna be the, the sensors on the conveyor belts need to be to this degree sensitivity and yada, yada.
For, for me, energy and sustainability, the HVAC and all of the other systems should be commissioned. They should be functioning, um, as intended per design. Uh, we should have all of our warranties in place. Um, everything that was in our design specifications is actually what's been delivered. When we, when we prescribe a low VOC paint, that was actually the one that was put on the, in, in the [00:46:00] building, so we wanna verify all of that.
So commissioning means very different things to a lot of different people. Um, and so it's, it's gonna be a, a while when, while we arrive at a process where everybody gets what they want through the commissioning process. That's not where it is right now. I don't think that's where the industry is either.
Um, and so we need to figure out a better way, um, to, to check all of these different things for all of these different teams, uh, to actually make sure the building that we wanted is being delivered. I mean, at big companies like Amazon, unfortunately, the truth is that we still don't have a feedback loop from operations to design.
So we, we design a building, we launch it, construct it, do everything right, give it to operations. The first day they go in, they change everything in it. They're like, "This is not where we want our shelving. This is not where we want the electrical points. Can you please update this?" And now your as-builts are no longer as-builts from day one.
Um, so that's kind of like the first problem you wanna solve for. You want that feedback from your operations back to [00:47:00] design so that the next building we launch is actually a building they want. Mm-hmm. Um, so it, it- Commissioning is needed. Um, most people have it. We still don't know how to use it truly well-
Brad Bonavida: Yeah.
Niharika Kishore: Interesting ... uh, to deliver things we want.
Brad Bonavida: I think, I think the, my biggest takeaway from your description of why it's so much harder than the s- simplistic way I was, I was putting it is that I, I'm very narrowly talking about it as like the commissioning of the HVAC and the controls and everything that an energy manager would relate to, yet you're also commissioning this as a office or f- well, fulfillment center might be even a better...
You're talking about the conveyor belts, you're talking about the shelving. There's all these other aspects and, you know, the energy and getting the, the building systems right is just a tiny piece of that.
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. And I mean, now you put robotics in them. We've got robots walking around at the buildings.
They need a certain kind of concrete or a certain kind of design of the building. So we need that feedback back to [00:48:00] design. Um, and so, so once, once you've got that feedback going, yes, commissioning is gonna work because then we know who wants what. We can put it as a requirement in that commission, think of it as a commissioning checklist, and have the agents walk through and make sure everything's getting delivered.
But we're not there yet.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. I, yeah, I can only imagine how difficult it is at scale and, and, uh, you know, so much of what you've been talking about is the scale that you deal with of doing this at so many pl- locations at once. Uh, with that being said, my final hard question for you before we go to carve-outs is what can someone with a smaller portfolio that's not the size of Amazon's take away from the approach that you guys are using across all of these buildings and all these different systems?
Niharika Kishore: Um, I think the first thing is having a construction program manager provide that horizontal view. Um, I'm the only person on most projects that's also talking to whoever thought about the project to the, and the operations teams. I'm talking to the entire life cycle of a building from when we're thinking about it to [00:49:00] when it gets launched to when it gets retrofitted and relaunched and handed over to operations again.
A building will change ownership at all of these different stages, um, from thinking to design to pre-construction, construction startup operations. Um, requirements for each of these different teams are different. And so there needs to be the horizontal view so that I now know, okay, when design's talking about this, that's not what the operations team- Yeah
wants. I'm that connective tissue- I love that ... uh, back to championing all of these different teams' requirements. They're all owners on the program. Mm-hmm. My job is being the owner's rep on this program and make sure we're launching it successfully within budget, and we don't want change orders. We don't wanna have to deal with demos.
We don't wanna have to deal with additional vendors, um, if we don't want to, and so on. And so this, this horizontal visibility is very important. Yeah. Equally important is the vertical visibility because only the construction manager knows what are the [00:50:00] different challenges at their sites. That if I have 20 people-- If I have five people renovating the restroom, I have six more people doing the break room, the GC's at max capacity.
So do we need to switch, uh, resourcing around to make sure, uh, we can still deliver all of these programs on schedule? So equally important is that vertical view at every site to make sure that all of, all of what the requirements for that site are being met, um, sustainably.
Brad Bonavida: Fantastic answer. I completely agree.
Okay, cool. Let's, uh, let's wrap there. We'll do some carve-outs really quick. Um, I, I'll go first. Uh, for, for my... for our deep fans who listen to all the podcasts, last time I was talking about my, uh, my saga with a dog door that I need to install. I installed the dog door this weekend, so I cut a, a giant gaping hole in the side wall of our house and installed it.
Now my problem is that the, the house is... the inside floor is a lot higher than the floor of, uh, or the ground level outside, so the dog door's floating two feet above the ground, so the dog, my dog [00:51:00] can't jump out of there. So the project for next weekend is to build a ramp so he can actually get out. So by the next podcast, I'm hoping that I'm not, no longer talking about the dog door project saga that I've been on.
How about you?
Niharika Kishore: Um, I, um... So background context, I had a baby six months ago, so I'm still figuring out- Congratulations. Thank you. We've talked about that,
Brad Bonavida: yeah.
Niharika Kishore: Thank you. So I'm still figuring out what life is, um, to a six-month-old mom who is also a wife, who also wants to have a really stellar, rocking career.
Um, so I'm trying to figure out what that new balance looks like, um, so I'm not, I'm not cheating on any one of those, uh, different roles. Uh, apart from that, I am also focusing on making time for myself. Um, to anyone else that has young babies and toddlers knows it's very hard to get lost in all of the household chores and all of these different things that need to happen, um, at home.
It's equally important to find time for yourself. [00:52:00] Um, so I'm finally getting back to painting. Um, I started my new painting last week. I hope to finish it before the end of this year. That's a 2026 goal for me. Nice. Um, but I do this thing called Madhubani henna painting. It's a, it's an art form I developed myself.
It's a, a cross between an ancient Indian art form, which has a lot of figurines with fine, uh, pen work, uh, fused with the henna art, the things we put on our hands in, um- Yeah ... in the Indian culture. So I do that with pen on paper. So I'm trying to do- That is awesome ... a little bit more of that this year.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. I think that you are a role model to any, any mother career aspiring person out there who's doing a whole... you know, juggling so many things at once. Um, and my only ask for you is please send me a picture of this painting when you're, when you're ready to. That sounds really cool, so that's
Niharika Kishore: great.
Absolutely will do. And then side by side, I'm trying to get my baby to eat solids for the first time. [00:53:00]
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. So
Niharika Kishore: that's going.
Brad Bonavida: I- All right. That's great. Cool. Well, this has been super fun. Thank you so much for being on it, and thank you everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.
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.
Welcome to Nexus Labs, the home for the Connected Buildings Ecosystem—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus Labs, sign up for our Connected Buildings Briefing, a 5-minute briefing on the people, tools, and playbooks changing how buildings run. Delivered every two weeks to 8,000+ building professionals.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest minds in the industry.
Nexus Labs runs an annual conference, NexusCon, and a quarterly virtual conference series, NexusCast.
Episode 201 is a conversation with Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs and Niharika Kishore from Amazon.
Summary
This episode explores how Amazon is integrating energy efficiency and sustainability into the design, construction, and renovation of its massive 800 million square-foot real estate portfolio. Niharika Kishore shares how her team evolved from optimizing existing building operations to implementing standardized energy conservation measures across 40–50 sites annually, up from just 10–12. The conversation dives into how Amazon scales these initiatives through standardized scopes, outcome-based contracting, commissioning, and centralized warranty tracking. They also unpack key lessons for organizations of any size, including how to scale impact by narrowing scope, managing the full project lifecycle, and systematically applying lessons learned. It’s a practical look at how to turn sustainability goals into repeatable, measurable results across a large building portfolio.
Mentions and Links
- Subscribe to the Connected Buildings Briefing: https://www.nexuslabs.online/
- Become a Nexus Pro member: https://www.nexuslabs.online/pro
- Sign up for NexusCast #4: https://www.nexuslabs.online/nexuscast-4
Highlights
Introduction (0:00)
At the Nexus (1:30)
Rapid Fire Context Setting (4:17)
Where Niharika began with Amazon - Sustainability (9:03)
Where Niharika is now with Amazon - Portfolios manager (28:21)
Carve Outs (50:27)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S800157-16073.
Full transcript
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!
Brad Bonavida: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Nexus Podcast Playbook series, where we dive into the weeds with building owners and operators about the playbooks they are running to achieve connected buildings outcomes. This episode is for energy managers, sustainability managers, and capital projects teams who are focused on creating the best buildings possible while meeting the energy and sustainability goals they have.
Today, we're digging into Amazon's energy program, specifically from the lens of Niharika Kishore, who's played multiple energy-related roles over the last six years. This podcast is also great for commissioning agents, it's great for general contractors, master systems integrators, and anyone who supports large organizations like Amazon with massive portfolios and lots of energy usage And quick note, if you're trying to stay on top of the space without wading through vendor noise, we write a short newsletter.
It's called "The Connected Buildings Briefing." It's about a five-minute breakdown of what's worth paying attention to. It's read by over 9,000. We send it out every other Wednesday, and you can grab it in the show notes if you wanna sign up. My name is Brad Bonavita. I'm the head of product at [00:01:00] Nexus Labs, and today I'm joined by Niharika Kishore, senior portfolios manager of worldwide operations at Amazon.
Niharika, how are you doing today?
Niharika Kishore: Good. Very excited to talk to you all.
Brad Bonavida: Me too. I'm very happy to have you. You and I have been working on scheduling this now for, like, four months, so we made it happen. We worked through the logistics. Um, so buckle up and enjoy, everybody, as we get into the complexity of energy and sustainability in one of the largest corporate real estate portfolios on the planet, over 800 million square feet.
Before we get into the full conversation here about Amazon's portfolio, we're gonna start with At the Nexus, which is just where we review what's going on with Nexus Labs. Uh, the biggest thing is this is our first podcast since Nexus Con 2026. Uh, it's a wrap. Uh, you were there, Niharika. What did you enjoy about the event?
What did you think? I know you, you, you had a short amount of time there 'cause you had some, some family stuff going on, but what'd you think?
Niharika Kishore: I think my most favorite takeaway was, um, meeting a lot of old friends, colleagues, and industry contacts, [00:02:00] uh, from the previous years, um, and deepening those relationships, and then also meeting a lot of new companies and new people and, uh, new grads coming into, uh, the sustainability energy construction space, which is very exciting, uh, to hear their new perspective.
Uh, so it was, it was a good takeaway from that.
Brad Bonavida: Great. Yeah, you presented this year, which we'll be diving into, and last year. Um, and speaking of those presentations, w-we are just about to release all the recordings from, uh, all of this year's presentations. So that's over 50 different recordings. Uh, there's 16 product demos in there.
And you got-- These are the, you know... We, we got tons of abstract applications of people who wanted to speak, and this is the cream of the crop, the people that we actually selected who had really good stories to share. So, um, I'm really excited for those to come out. They're gonna be available, uh, at the beginning of November.
We'll send out an email the day that they're, you know, immediately released, but it's gonna be, you know, within a week here. Um, it'll be-- They'll be released when people are listening to this podcast. These [00:03:00] are for Nexus Pro members, so if you're not a Pro member, please check that out. Uh, it's only $350 a year, and it gets you access to all Nexus Con recordings, so all the ones from this year and last year and the year before.
It gets you our Smart Buildings Awareness course, which is, like, a six-hour course that kind of gets people up to speed really fast on the things that we talk about It gives you access to the Nexus Marketplace, which is where we've categorized over 900 different vendors of-- with what they do for building owners and operators.
And then it gives you unlimited access to our virtual event series, Nexus Cast. Speaking of Nexus Cast, we do have one of those coming up as well, which is kind of the next event that Nexus Labs is doing. It's on technology-enabled and outcome-based services, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit here and what that means to you at Amazon.
Um, but that's December 9th. It's from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM Eastern Time. It's completely virtual. We try to run it just like we run a Nexus Con session. So if you've heard about Nexus Con or you're curious, we try to do the same thing virtually, which means it's not just a webinar. We've got a lot of [00:04:00]roundtable discussions.
We've got demos. We've got a ton of different where-- areas where you're gonna be actually talking to the people that are in the room, w- or the virtual room, I suppose, with, um, this topic and what it means to you. So you can sign up for that as well. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Okay. That's the, uh, update.
So let's get into this. Um, first I love to do just rapid fire context setting so people know a little bit more about why you're on the pod, who you are, and what we're gonna talk about Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your professional background and how you got to where you are today?
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. Um, so I was really inspired by "The Inconvenient Truth" by, um, Al Gore. Uh, when that, when that documentary came out, it kind of shattered my whole world on what am I gonna do when I grow up. And so that got me interested in climate change, sustainability, energy efficiency, and those kind of things. Uh, started some grassroot campaigns in my, um, high school, um, as well as my, uh, where I used to stay, so my, uh, my residential, uh, place of living.
Uh, started some, [00:05:00] uh, rainwater harvesting, uh, for, for the 20 houses that were in my, uh, in my colony. Um, started a lot of tea plantation drives and just, you know, chatting with, uh, friends and, uh, uh, different classmates in school on what is sustainability and why is it important. Um, from there, went on to get a bachelor's in renewable energy engineering.
Um, when I completed-- When I was in my third year of engineering studies, I had two paths in front of me. One was getting into research and development, uh, which meant researching solar cells, how do we make them more efficient, um, other forms of renewable energy, wind, tidal, wave, um, hydroelectric, so on. Um, the other path in front of me was actually figuring out how do we implement renewable energy in urban space.
Um, so I chose the latter. Uh, went in for my master's in sustainable urban planning, uh, which was centered around, um, installing renewable energy in buildings. What made me really curious was that 85% of the buildings that humans need have already been built, uh, which [00:06:00] means we need to make them more efficient versus building new, uh, buildings.
And so that was my focus, retrofitting existing buildings, um, energy efficiency, retro commissioning. Uh, so that's the kind of, uh, formal studies I went through in my master's. Uh, worked on campus in various roles as teaching assistant, re-research assistant. Uh, worked for a, a center called the Smart Energy Design and Assistant Center, which was our, um, incubator of sustainability ideas on campus.
So we used to do a lot of energy efficiency commissioning work for, uh, buildings in Illinois. And from there, uh, I worked with an engineering firm out of Nashville for about four years, um, as a sustainability consultant. Um, did a bunch of, uh, green building rating system consulting, so LEED, WELL, Fitwel, ILFI.
You name it, I've done it. Um, and then a lot to do with energy efficiency in terms of energy audits, commissioning, energy modeling. Anything that touched energy, water [00:07:00] waste in buildings, that was my focus in that role. From there, I decided to join Amazon. And as, and as a consultant, I would work with one client on one project, which was a tiny aspect, um, of sustainability.
Um, I wanted to make the leap of working cross-functionally across multiple buildings so that I could maximize the impact Um, that I could have in decarbonizing, uh, the built environment. So I got hired by Amazon as a program manager for sustainability, built out Amazon's first existing building sustainability program, um, aimed at energy efficiency retrofits.
Helped certify, uh, the first, uh, fulfillment center with ILFI Zero Carbon. Helped design and launch, uh, North America's first and second largest CO2 refrigeration, uh, warehouses. Um, launched Amazon's first water efficiency program targeted to reduce, um, energy used in our flushes, in our wash basins and so on.
Launched Amazon's first ambassadors program, which was aimed at [00:08:00]exciting sites and the associates about sustainability so they could start owning their metrics, uh, for waste and energy, um, at their sites. Did a lot of those cool things, uh, for Amazon first while, uh, Amazon was still s- figuring out what...
how do we meet the Climate Pledge goals, and I know we're gonna talk about that, uh, in a bit. Um, and then currently, uh, I work in the worldwide operations team, which, uh, where I focus on special projects. So anything that doesn't follow a regular design and construction process kind of falls in my lap to figure out how to execute, uh, most of which are sites that we're already operating out of, um, so how do we retrofit them, uh, while we're continuing our operations.
Um, so that's my current focus with a lens of sustainability on it.
Brad Bonavida: Sweet. That's great. We're, we're very happy to have you on the implementation side of the industry. I'm glad you made that decision way back when instead of research, selfishly. We're ha- look, I don't... The amount of times you said, "I launched, I was involved in," you're, you're out, [00:09:00]you're one of those people actually out there making it work, so thank you.
Um, yeah, so a lot of people are familiar with the Amazon Climate Pledge, but when we start these, these podcasts, I always like to really get down to, like, what are the business outcomes that really drives your role? So You're in sustainability, you're in energy. What does that mean for Amazon? What's the ultimate goal?
Like, you can, you know, I-- you mentioned the Climate p- Pledge. Maybe a little bit more on that or whatever else there is that's driving Amazon and drives your work specifically.
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. So Amazon's main goal is, uh, achieving net zero carbon by 2040. We call it the Climate Pledge. We also urge other companies to sign with us.
Uh, we were the co-founders for the Climate Pledge. Um, but this could mean very different things for Amazon businesses. Amazon is one company, but it almost o- operates as multiple startups within it. Um, so net zero by 2040 for a data center means reducing the energy use in data centers, offsetting because we obviously can't, uh, go down to zero energy.
Um, it's hard to even have on-site renewable energy [00:10:00] to support all of the energy needs, uh, for a data center. So- Yeah ... offsets green, uh, green power is, is what that team would work on. And reducing the amount of water we're using to cool the data centers. Um, for grocery, it means reducing food waste, uh, agriculture sustainability, um, transportation related sustain, uh, emissions, uh, from transporting food from one place to the other, for growing the food, um, in, in our agriculture networks.
It also means, to some extent, um, buildings energy efficiency, um, though it's a smaller component, um, for grocery. Um, for retail, it is really everything under the sun from buildings to transportation to shipping, aviation fuel, um, manufacturers. So when you get into products, it's gonna be our embodied carbon that we're using on the materials to build the products.
And then the fourth is our office spaces, which is gonna be more towards, um, recycling on site, um, energy used by the buildings and the equipment [00:11:00] within our office spaces and so on. So every different vertical within Amazon has their own sustainability teams that are translating what the Climate Pledge means for their business, setting goals, uh, that they can help achieve, and then building strategies towards achieving those goals with glide paths on what is the best way to, um, get to the Climate Pledge.
So that's what it really means for Amazon. Depends on which, which part of the business you're in.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. I, I'm gonna... I, I'm always trying to put my, my mind in the perspective of a listener who has the same role, and it's probably a lot of energy managers and sustainability managers who are in smaller portfolios than you because you have base- one of the largest portfolios in the world.
So my question that I would imagine that they might be thinking is, everything you said there is so sustainability driven, carbon emissions. How is Amazon thinking about just like the operating costs as well? If you're reducing energy, you're probably saving operating costs at, uh, you know, as well, and that's what I think a lot of these smaller portfolios are thinking of.
Do [00:12:00] you guys even bring those KPIs and metrics into the work that you do, or is it a separate group?
Niharika Kishore: It really depends on the business and what the percentage of Energy bills is, um, uh, is a percent of the revenue for that business. For AWS, it's a big percent. Yeah. We're spending a lot on just the electricity that we're using, um, to cool, cool the sites down, to run- Sure
the data centers and so on. Um, for grocery it's big in terms of, um, it's not as big but big-ish in terms of the energy use in the buildings, the stores. Uh, but the, the bigger cost is the growing the food. Um, so the money- Yeah ... we're putting in the fertilizers, the money we're putting in, uh, the organics, um, lines, uh, that we're setting up, uh, for the food, um, and so on.
So it really depends on which, what it means for each of the different businesses, um, and as a percentage of revenue. Um, with that saying, um, any money that we save, [00:13:00] um, introducing operating costs is money we can invest to further sustainability goals. Uh, money is finite even for a company like Amazon. Uh, we still do have a really hard time getting approvals with, for projects we wanna do.
Um, and just sharing some examples for buildings, the biggest challenge is we lease our buildings. Um, these leases could be anywhere from 5 to 20 years, uh, three to five years being the typical norm. Now, there's only so many sustainability initiatives that you can put in a building that will pay back within three to five years.
Embodied carbon initiatives themselves have paybacks of over 10 years. So it's a very hard sell to leadership to actually get us, get, give us approvals, uh, to put a lot of the good projects, uh, which are expensive. So car- uh, low carbon concrete is expensive. Timber roofing is expensive. So these are projects that we first have to pilot proof of concept and then get in- Yeah
kind of approvals for scaling. Um, so any money that we can save from the, the operating [00:14:00] expenses is money that is available for us to put back, um- Nice ... in, in the bank to implement new projects. That could mean having 20 more sites with BMSs. That could mean, um, having or setting up a recycling and donations program at 100 more sites.
Um, so, so that, uh, when you look at it that way, it's a huge impact. So even if we're saving, um, just a couple of hundred thousand dollars or a couple of millions, that could mean a big impact, um, in some of the other initiatives in other areas of sustainability, uh, other than just energy.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. That's great.
Yeah, I've, I've seen that approach. We did a podcast with Weaver State, and it just seems like when, when energy managers are allowed to reinvest the money that they're saving, it creates this flywheel that really gets people moving and gets the, the motivation and the ambition and just the quality of work there.
Okay, cool. So I want to, uh, segue kind of into, I wanted to kind of talk about your career at Amazon as an arc because [00:15:00] When you presented at Nexus Con last year in 2025, you were in the energy management track and you had a-- an, I mean, you're still energy management focused, but you had a different job then.
And this year when you talked at, uh, Nexus Con, you were in the construction track. So can you first remind me what your previous title was, and then explain to the audience what the difference between the two roles is?
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. So my previous title was, um, senior sustainability specialist, um, where I was identifying, um, for Walmart Grocery.
Um, so I was on the grocery side of the house before this. Um, identifying what sustainability and energy efficiency, uh, meant for grocery org specifically, and how do we translate, um, the climate pledge, uh, for Walmart Grocery in their buildings. So I was on the buildings energy efficiency portion of it on the existing building side, which is buildings we're currently operating out of, which was over 500, um, at the time.
Um, and then figuring out how do we reduce their [00:16:00] energy, um, energy usage. How do we, uh, meet all of the All of the mini goals, micro goals that come under the climate pledge, uh, for those businesses. Um, in that role, um, I expanded the existing buildings program that I built in the role before that, um, for grocery, uh, which meant to do a lot with, uh, refrigeration retrofits, um, HVAC retrofits.
Refrigeration was about 40 to 50% of our energy use per building. Um, HVAC was a close second at about 30%. Everything else was lumped into one. We already had LED lighting, um, in all of our buildings. So our really big levers for, uh, energy efficiency were refrigeration and HVAC. Now, um, anyone that's in this business knows grocery is not a very high margin business.
Uh, we were leasing buildings, so three to five-year leases. Um, no- with no line of sight whether that building is gonna get renewed, um, in terms of leasing. Um, and so I had to [00:17:00] find, like, the lowest cost, no-cost measures to help us reduce bills. Um, so refrigeration, tweaking certain things like defrost temperatures, um, ramping up and down on refrigeration cycles, um, installing air curtains so our refrigerated air isn't just leaking out of the freezers.
Um, simple projects like those actually led us to about a 20% efficiency increase, um, in, in our systems with bills, um, reducing significantly risk and safety reducing, um, significantly because we were able to reduce the amount of condensate that was happening, uh, in our buildings.
Brad Bonavida: And these are, this is all in operating buildings that
Niharika Kishore: people are- Oh, these are fully operational buildings.
There's 24/7. Yeah. So the warehousing part of this business is 24/7, which means we can't obviously shut down anything in the building. Um, if we wanna do any work, we have to get backup generators on the site, which was a whole other expensive headache, uh, w- for a low margin business. Yeah. Um, so, so my [00:18:00] mandate was im- uh, implementing initiatives without shutting anything down, without operating any...
without disrupting any operations, uh, without having to get any additional permits or permissions from landlords or Utilities or jurisdictions or anything else. Basically operating as Amazon Business as usual within a building, but still trying to save energy. Yeah. Um, so I played around a lot with set points, um, and a lot of pilots, a lot of failures, a lot of successes after those failures.
Uh, but there was a lot of trial and error to figure out what would be a good project at scale, uh, for these fully operational buildings.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about, uh, the, the M&V aspect of that? Specifically, when you've got a building that's operating, you do not have a constrained experiment where it's easy to tell, like, you know, we switched one variable, how did it, how did it go?
So how are you dealing with proving your energy savings through some sort of M&V while [00:19:00] the building is still doing a million other things?
Niharika Kishore: Yes. So very good question. Um, and M&V is the reason our program was actually successful and was able to scale from, um, 10 buildings to 50 buildings to 500 buildings.
Um Anyone that's operating out of a building knows that things keep changing. Um, I would go in and tweak the temperature set point, set it back a couple of degrees when there are fewer people in the buildings at night, uh, and do all of those things while the operations team would just go and add another refrigerator in the building.
And so when we started looking at bills, we were like, "Why are we not saving energy?" Um, so that was used to be the first question that the operations team would ask me like, "You're doing all of this work in our buildings. We're not-- Our bills are going up. What are you guys doing?" And so I had to literally sit down with the operations team for a month and point out, "You just added two new refrigerators to your building.
Here is how much load that is. This is X percent of your [00:20:00] bill. Um, you just added all of this shelving, which means now you've got all of this extra product in the building that we need to cool down and yada, yada." So I had to sit with them and explain that every action of the operations team had a consequence in terms of energy.
No matter how much work I did, unless you don't do anything in your building, it's, it's very hard for me to say, um, how much energy my program is saving. That was one conversation. The other was, um, I looked towards data science and the engineering teams and we're like, "If we're putting in dock shelters in a building, we know exactly how much air is now not leaking out.
Can we put CFMs around that? And then can we put math around it in terms of how much air leakage we're saving, which means how much less air do we need to condition? Can we convert that into kilowatt hours and say, 'Here's how much energy we saved equal to this is the dollar saving we have, uh, per month.'
If this initiative remains applied to your building, which means the dock shelter is working as it is." We've got sensors around that. We plugged [00:21:00]sensor data, um, into that for downtime. Um, so anytime the, the dock shelters went down, we said, "Okay, for so many hours the shelter was down, which means we didn't save this energy."
And so at the end of this, we had a math that could tell us, um, in an entire year how much energy we, we saved for each of those initiatives. So we built guardrails around every initiative like that. So for the low-flow plumbing fixtures, it was we're gonna use so much less water, which means our water heaters are gonna have to run so much less, which means here's how much energy we're saving.
So we started putting math around all of these initiatives with sensors, uh, and put it on a dashboard, uh, to show us whether the initiative is working or not working, and then auto-calculate how much energy we're saving if the initiative is on.
Brad Bonavida: Nice. What was that technology that you mentioned for s- saving the dock?
That's for, uh, keeping the air in the building or I'm not
Niharika Kishore: familiar with that technology. Yeah, so it's like dock shelters. Um, typically, um, on the grocery, in grocery buildings, you've got these big, uh, the dock doors are sized to the big trucks, [00:22:00] the trailer trucks. Mm-hmm. Uh, but sometimes we've got like these box trucks and smaller trucks that are stationed in those really big dock doors, which means there was a lot of conditioned air from a refrigerated building- Ah
leaking out. And so we added some curtains, we added some dock levelers so that when a smaller truck- I see ... is standing at the, uh, the dock door, we're not leaking, um, unnecessary air, um, out of the building. Gotcha.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. One, one more question I think on your last role is I, I wanna talk about kind of the, the people aspect of it.
It sounds like you were in a, what could be a difficult position of you are part of this energy group who's coming in to save energy and sustainability, and you're coming into somebody's building, this maintenance operations team who's trying to fix things and keep the building operating, and their job is already hard, and here comes in your team like, "Ah, we're gonna change a bunch of things to save the energy."
How did you maintain those relationships or how do you get those people on board to support you and not feel like you're, you know, a pain in their butt that you have to come in here and do this stuff?
Niharika Kishore: The first thing was [00:23:00] actually hearing them and their problems. My first 30 days on the job was really just calling up the facility managers for these sites and talking to them on what issues are you facing in your building.
Um, one common thread that came out of that was we obviously don't have enough resources. No company will ever have enough resources to do anything they-- everything they really wanna do. Um, so they were resource-constrained, but the other problem was that they had no way of telling what's breaking in their buildings.
These teams were so bandwidth-constrained that they were reacting to things breaking down versus proactively maintaining. So which meant in a twenty-four/seven warehouse, we're in peak summer, we've got all of these Prime Days going on. We've got two hundred additional people, pickers, in these buildings working as temp workers, and suddenly your air conditioning stops working.
Um, and [00:24:00] that's when the facility manager would get a call. There would be severity one tickets, uh, that would be really expensive fixes. Um, so we called them truck rolls. So the truck rolls are mechanical vendors coming in on site last minute on an emergency basis, which typically costs you two X of what it would had you proactively planned maintenance for your site, um, and, and made sure that these systems are properly maintained.
Um, so the first-- that was the first issue I found was that everyone reacting to stuff already breaking down, which meant that everybody's scrambling, uh, to figure out how to fix it so we don't lose productivity or product in, in... For grocery, that was a huge thing. We had millions of dollars worth of product inside these buildings, um, that we would have to throw away, um, if systems weren't working as they should.
That was problem number one. Um, the second problem was I sat with the operations team and the facilities team. Operations team are working in the building. Facilities team are supporting them to make sure their building is [00:25:00] functional. Um, I sat with them to identify the initiatives that they From the get-go, they knew that we're not gonna be pushing initiatives down their throats.
It's more like we're gonna develop these initiatives with them that actually solve the problems that they're having. So it was one friction less for us to, um, get approvals. Um, so I sat with them to develop the... First figure out what the problems in their buildings were. A lot of them were our flushes keep leaking, our building's really old, um, our mechanical systems keep failing.
Our refrigeration systems is doubling up as, uh, dehumidifiers because our mechanical systems don't have dehumidifiers on them, and those kind of things. So, so I heard all of them and I'm like, "Okay, here's a list of initiatives that I think would be a really good fit for these kind of buildings." Um, so that's how the existing buildings program actually got developed.
It was a grounds-up approach. Like, I went to these sites, I audited a couple of them, spoke to all of these, um, um, all of the operators and the operations [00:26:00] teams, um, and then came up with a list of initiatives, put guardrails around those initiatives, developed their costs and budgets, and then went to leadership with, "Here's the white paper, here's all the research.
We need so much money to pilot in 10 buildings. Can we do it?" Um, so then it was a much easier sell because we're-- at that point, we were not thinking of initiatives in a silo and then working with them to implement. It was the other way around. Like, they told us, "Here's what needs to be fixed." We were gonna do that in a more energy efficient way.
Um, so that's how- That's awesome ... that, that work started.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. That's seems like maybe the most important takeaway someone else should take from this is- ... aligning your energy incentives and ener- or energy initiatives with things that are a problem for maintenance and operations gets everybody going in the same direction compared to just a- Yeah
siloed energy project that they don't see how it helps them with maintenance. That's-
Niharika Kishore: Yeah ...
Brad Bonavida: that's great.
Niharika Kishore: And I've had my fair share of calls with- Mm-hmm ... with, um, operations [00:27:00] team calling me up, "You put a BMS in my building, my HVAC is not working anymore. My T-stat's not working." And I'm like, "The only reason you know your T-stat's not working is because we put the BMS in-"
and now it's telling us it's not working." Yeah. "Otherwise, you wouldn't know that the temperature set point in your building is not being met." Um, and so there was a lot of those educational, um, conversations and, uh, trainings as well on when I put a BMS in your building, here's what it means. I'm not taking control away from you, I'm giving you extra visibility into stuff that might break down on your side so we can- Yeah
proactively start maintaining. So it was a lot of, um, a lot of training and a lot of conversation, um, in a non-confrontational way that- Yeah ... we're doing- Yeah ... we're doing this to help you. Here's how it's gonna help you. Once they start understanding that, then that's how I became the single-threaded leader then for all of Amazon, uh, for BMS questions.
Like, other teams outside of grocery would then want to have a meeting to understand how grocery [00:28:00] got approval to put 500 BMSs in while retail hasn't been able to do that in five years. And so it was, it was this whole strategy of grounds up working with them to figure out and then training them on here's what this data is telling you and how it's useful for you.
Brad Bonavida: Yep. That's awesome. Okay, so let's, let's kind of transition. You're, you're, you're still dri- in your new role, you're still driving at the same business outcomes. You're still focused on the Climate Pledge, et cetera, but now you're on the construction capital projects side of that. Explain, explain, you know, you just did a really good job of what your old job was.
How has this transitioned and what, what are you doing now?
Niharika Kishore: So it was all about ti- it's all about timing. So my old job, I joined Amazon in 2021. We were just two years into signing the Climate Pledge, uh, which meant we were still figuring out what strategy needs to be, what these programs need to be. So that's what I built in my previous role.
But that was already now built, right? So we already have an existing buildings program, now we've got an ambassadors program, we've got a water efficiency program, we've got a [00:29:00] zero waste program, and so on. Um, so I now wanted to transfer over on the more, on the heavy execution side, construction side of actually making sure these practices are getting practiced.
Um, so having programs in place is one thing, but actually implementing them, uh, across scale is a whole other thing. Um, so for, for this role, I was focusing specifically on special projects, which meant anything that does not follow a typical design and construction timeline. And when I say typical design and construction timeline, I meant you think of a project, you go through the design process, you get design documents, you engage with the, uh, architects and engineers, walk the...
You, you, you figure out, build the energy models or the digital twins to figure out what this building might look like. You then transfer over to the pre-construction team who actually does the permitting, um, setting up the RFP for GCs and that process, and then the construction process where you contract with the GCs to actually build the building.
This is a typical [00:30:00] process. Um, retrofits, um, adding stuff to existing buildings, expanding existing buildings does not follow this typical process. Sometimes you need a permit, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you need three different GCs on the site just based on how specialized the project is. Um, and so anything, any of these special projects come to our team.
I specialize on the retrofit side of it specifically based on my, uh, prior experience at Amazon on how do we How do we retrofit buildings when we're operating out of them? So we're already in a building with 1,000 associates. We wanna redo all of the restrooms. So how do you do that? I mean, it's, it's one thing, shut the building and then we'll retrofit everything in two months and go back in.
But that's-- we can't do that at Amazon. Our operations have to continue. Um, so my job is to carefully work with our internal teams to first come up with the design, uh, make sure that we're meeting all of our internal design standards and practices, our specifications. [00:31:00] Um, I act as the, uh, owner's rep and the commissioning agent both on, on these projects, which means that I champion, um, uh, whoever's asking for the program, I champion all of their requirements.
Um, and then I champion all of our sustainability requirements on the projects as commissioning agent, just to make sure that, um, our standard specifications, if it calls for low-flow plumbing fixtures, that's what's going into the design actually. Um, so I act as that, that lens, um, on these programs. And then I work with the GCs on execution, um, and then with construction managers at their particular sites.
Now, what I really wanna highlight is I'm not a construction manager. I'm a construction program manager, which means that construction managers provide this vertical visibility at their site. There could be multiple programs running at their sites, um, from retrofits to, um, adding different kind of shelving, uh, to changing out some of the robotics fittings, to adding [00:32:00]more material handling equipment at their sites, whatever else.
There's multiple things that are happening at each site. The construction manager manages the day-to-day on the site. I, as a program manage- construction program manager, manage the horizontal. There's 50 sites that are getting, um restroom refreshes, I will manage all of those 50 sites to make sure we're meeting all of our, uh, budgets, we're meeting our schedules, we're meeting our risk tolerance, we have all the resources we need to execute, and we're meeting all of the sustainability goals across all of these programs.
Because believe it or not, sustainability tends to make it really well when you're building a building from scratch. But when you're retrofitting, you get into all of these micro contracts and microscopes, um, that don't always follow all of the design, uh, specifications and standards. So that's my goal to make sure that even when we're retrofitting, we retrofit to the highest sustainability standards that are in our specifications at this time.
Brad Bonavida: Gotcha. So it's not just about sustain- uh, not that your old, only old [00:33:00] job was only about sustainability, but now you have to look at the whole construction project as a whole. Not only do you want that bathroom retrofit to be more sustainable, you also just need this construction related project to go right.
Like you need the bathrooms to be installed in time in the correct way. Uh, what, when- And
Niharika Kishore: that, that's a, that's an aspect of sustainability. If you go back to the triple bottom line, it's people, planet, profit. Mm-hmm. So my role, this role specifically actually focuses on all three now. The people, because they're the ones that are working in these buildings, so you wanna make sure where they're up to Amazon standards; the planet, because I've got the sustainability lens on it; and profit.
We wanna deliver- Yeah ... these projects within budget and on time, um, so everyone can go about their business happily.
Brad Bonavida: Yep. Explain to me the... One part I don't quite understand yet is, okay, uh, let's just stick with the bathroom refresh as our example. Who decides that the bathroom refresh has to happen? And is that coming from your program or is that the construction manager team who's saying that our site's ready for that?
How, where does that come from?
Niharika Kishore: So there's a team of, [00:34:00] uh, so that's the owner team. So the, the operations leaders in these programs have these surveys that, that, the associate surveys that go out to sites where they gather back feedback from, uh, what kind of improvement sites would like to have. Um, we then sit with that team to prioritize which sites are really in need of refresh, which typically happens to be our oldest sites.
Um, if we're in a building for Over 10 years, there is some kind of refresh work that's needed. These buildings are truly heavily used. Um, and so the restrooms, the break rooms, the conference rooms, the, the, the areas that associates are typically using do need to be refreshed, um, about every 10 years. So the first lens is, um, pick our oldest buildings and then figure out what's the common theme, uh, among, um, the feedback that associates are giving us in terms of what needs to be, uh, upgraded at their sites.
We then start bucketizing, um, that, okay, so there's like 20 sites that need re- [00:35:00] bathroom refresh. There's, like, 30 sites that need, um, conference rooms. There's 50 sites that need break room, and here's what's missing in those break rooms and yada, yada. So we figure out, we bucketize, um, all of the, the feedback that's coming in, and then I sit and design what the program around that should be and how can we...
Do we build this all into one program or should we split it up, uh, or whatever. So we-- Once we've got all of this big scope, I figure out what's gonna be the best way to, uh, put a program guardrail around certain scopes of these and then run it as, uh, a program across multiple sites. And so that's how multiple programs are born.
So BMS retrofits would be one program. The- Yeah ... the refresh program, which is the restrooms, conference rooms, break rooms, um, office spaces is one program. Um, conveyor belts, uh, upgrades is another separate program. It also depends on how complex, uh, these programs might be in terms of the GCs that might need to be on site, the architects, engineers that we might need, um, help with.[00:36:00]
Does a program require design, uh, and permitting and so on. So there's a lot of those other nuances that determine what goes in a program.
Brad Bonavida: Sure. That's, that's probably a good segue. I-I'd like to talk a little bit about the contracting structure, which I know is probably changes for every single one of these.
But when you're looking at an existing building and bringing in sustainability and keeping it connected to everything else that you're got going on in the building, what is your guys' approach to, like, master systems integrator or making sure that whatever you're doing is connecting in with the larger whatever's already going on with the building?
How do you guys think of the MSI role? Where does it sit in the contracting tier? Do these all have MSIs? Are you the MSI? H-How does that part work for you?
Niharika Kishore: It really depends on the different programs. So things like just general restroom, uh, refreshes, uh, you know, interiors refreshing basically, um, that's generic work, right?
Any GC- Yeah ... mostly any GC can, can execute that work. However, when it comes to things like BMS retrofits, [00:37:00] that's highly specialized work, so that would require an MSI. Um, installing generators, again, highly specialized work, requires special permitting. Um, so, so installing permanent generators on site would require a specialized, um, MSI or specialized vendors to, to help us implement that.
So it really depends on the complexity of the project and whether it's in the wheelhouse of that general contractor. Um, typically, if we've already got a GC on site doing one program, we try to slot in the other program within that schedule with the same GC. It, it works out well for them. They get more work, we get better pricing.
Um, and then the construction manager only has to manage the one GC on site and their subs. Uh, versus having multiple GCs on site, multiple vendors on site, kind of becomes like this, um Mixed, mixed chaos, um, on, on site which gets- Yeah ... really hard to manage, uh, from a scheduling and execution perspective.
So it really depends on- Does the, does the M- ... the complexity of the program.
Brad Bonavida: Does the [00:38:00] MSI usually sit underneath the GC or are you guys contracting that role directly to you?
Niharika Kishore: So the... No. So, so the GC sit under the MSI. MSI is gonna be the main, main person, the main team on the site, and then they will bring in their subs for, um, say the electrical work or the mechanical work or plumbing or whatever else.
Brad Bonavida: The GC, yeah, the GC will bring in those, and then the MSI sits outside of those essentially.
Niharika Kishore: So we contract with the MSI, MSI contracts with the GC, GC contracts with the subs. Oh, okay.
Brad Bonavida: I see. Cool. All right, great.
Niharika Kishore: And sometimes for quality control we will have a parallel owner's rep who would then work with the MSI to make sure everything else is, uh, running smoothly.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. That's... I, I always am curious about that part because it seems like there are a lot of different places that you can put the MSI, and maybe I, I'm a little biased from my controls and connected buildings background, but the closer that MSI sits to the owners, the more likely you are to actually get the [00:39:00] outcomes by integrating different systems together that the owners can actually benefit from it seems, so.
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. And we've actually done both ways. We've also done, uh, so we've done sequential contracts like the one I just talked about. We've also done parallel contracts where we, as Amazon, will contract with everyone separately, but that increases a lot of our admin work. It's easy to do that for one program, but if you're running like five programs, um, across 500 sites, it's very hard to be directly contracting with all of these different vendors, managing their invoicing, uh, making sure they're all running on, on, on schedule and budget.
So we prefer to have just one point of contact who can then have all of the contacts so we can-- We manage them, they manage everything else. Um, it does work out cheaper for us to do everything ourselves, but it's also a lot more work for us to do everything. Yeah. Sure. And then sometimes it's higher quality work, sometimes it's not.
I mean, if a program manager's spread really thin, um, there's, there's no way they can manage 500 sites with 50 vendors. Uh, it, it's, it's not possible.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. [00:40:00] That's a probably another good segue into figuring out how these things can all go right at the same time, standardizing the commissioning. Uh, walk us through that.
You've got, you've got dozens and dozens of projects going on at once. H- what are you-- what work are you doing to make sure that you're getting the same quality of work across all those sites?
Niharika Kishore: Um, for me, I've got a very robust lessons learned tracker, um, and that is a living document. Um, it is shared across different programs, so we're sharing from the refresh program to the BMS to others, um, and then also shared across different teams.
So grocery is sharing with retail, um, is, is gonna share with AWS and so on. Um, this lessons learned tracker basically is like a playbook on what can go wrong at your site if you're retrofitting while you're in it. Um, and so every time we run into a roadblock, it becomes, uh, uh, an issue... It's almost like an [00:41:00] issues log.
It becomes an issue on the lessons learned, and then it, it comes down to it explains how we triage that problem. So an example on the BMS program, we needed additional IT drops, and we didn't know that till MSI and the subs were on the site. So on the day of the job when they're supposed to be laying cabling, we realize and we're told that, "Hey, we, by the way, don't have enough bandwidth, so you're gonna need a couple of additional IT drops here."
And that the, the IT team is backlogged by six months because they downsized their team and now we've got these, um, contingent workers that are supporting that team, and then physically the IT team needs to be on the site on the day of data drop, and yeah, they are. This was like a new thing we had no idea of.
Um, so things like that, um, it, it kind of becomes hard to anticipate some of these issues from before if you haven't been on the site, ever done this project before. But when you're on the site and you've learned all of this, it can be [00:42:00] logged so that the next time AWS goes in to put a BMS, they know what Amazon's requirement is for having, um, an, an ID person, an ID drop, and here's the process to do that, um, in case anyone's looking.
So it kind of now beco- has become this lessons learned, um, log where you c- it, it's searchable, so you can search, um, IT drops, and then it's gonna show up where we had this problem, when we had this problem, what the solution was. So I think that is really important to make sure a program or a project is successful, um, at a site.
Does that answer your question?
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, it does. I, I also wanted you to talk a little bit about the commissioning side of it as well in terms of... Well, maybe let's start with the contracting structure of that. Is the commissioning agent underneath the GC? Is it d- report directly to you guys? And what are you getting out of-- how does that process look?
Niharika Kishore: Right now, commissioning is under the GC. We don't want that. Um, it, it, it violates the whole purpose of having commissioning. Like, we want it to be a third party that's independent of [00:43:00] Amazon as well as the GC and any other vendor, so they... Dispassionate third party. Um, that's what we're trying to get to.
We're not quite there yet. Uh, so for now, the commissioning, um, commissioning is under GC contracts. It is required on every project. However, um, commissioning contracts go both ways. Um, it's, it's one thing for Amazon to want commission, to want to commission their buildings and all of these projects. Uh, it's another thing for us to have the infrastructure to receive these reports and actually do something about them, uh, or make sure that we're reading, um, or, or inheriting the reports in the right way.
So every document folder has a commissioning folder. It's got a commissioning report in there. Nobody's actually reading it. Yeah. Um, and so three years down the line when warranties are voided and we suddenly find something's not working on the site, we go back and start looking in the commissioning report, and more than likely we'll find it that it was an issue in the commissioning report.
So we're now trying to work towards having [00:44:00] a solution where once the report is put in, somebody needs to view it. We still have to figure out who that's gonna be, whether that's gonna be the com- the construction team, uh, the construction manager, or whether that's gonna be the energy and sustainability, someone in my role, whether it's gonna be the construction program manager or whatever.
We still haven't, we don't have a perfect answer for who should be reading that report, uh, to make sure we're inheriting what we need to. Um, but it, that's been an issue. Like, our first problem was- Yeah ... we didn't have commissioning. Now we have commissioning. Our second problem is we're not doing anything about commissioning.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Yeah.
Niharika Kishore: Uh, so that's what we wanna solve for now.
Brad Bonavida: I was just gonna say, like, you are just nailing what we're trying to make this next Nexus cast about. So I'm, I, I want you to, um, come and share this perspective there. Specifically, the thing that's jumping out to me that you're saying is someone needs to read this report, and I'm just wondering if we can get to a place in this industry where no one has to read this report.
It's just, like, built into the contracting structure that if the commissioning doesn't pass, like, the, the work's [00:45:00] not done, right? I mean, is that... Are you guys trying to get to a point that, like, the report doesn't have to be read, it's just, it's part of the, the GC and all of their people know that they have to meet some functional testing baseline benchmark to be able to be done with the job?
Niharika Kishore: In theory, yes. In practical, that's not how it's gonna work because the operations team is looking for something very different, which means they want shelving, they want a roof, they want conveyor belts, and they want electricity. That's their requirement. Um, for the engineering team, it's gonna be the, the sensors on the conveyor belts need to be to this degree sensitivity and yada, yada.
For, for me, energy and sustainability, the HVAC and all of the other systems should be commissioned. They should be functioning, um, as intended per design. Uh, we should have all of our warranties in place. Um, everything that was in our design specifications is actually what's been delivered. When we, when we prescribe a low VOC paint, that was actually the one that was put on the, in, in the [00:46:00] building, so we wanna verify all of that.
So commissioning means very different things to a lot of different people. Um, and so it's, it's gonna be a, a while when, while we arrive at a process where everybody gets what they want through the commissioning process. That's not where it is right now. I don't think that's where the industry is either.
Um, and so we need to figure out a better way, um, to, to check all of these different things for all of these different teams, uh, to actually make sure the building that we wanted is being delivered. I mean, at big companies like Amazon, unfortunately, the truth is that we still don't have a feedback loop from operations to design.
So we, we design a building, we launch it, construct it, do everything right, give it to operations. The first day they go in, they change everything in it. They're like, "This is not where we want our shelving. This is not where we want the electrical points. Can you please update this?" And now your as-builts are no longer as-builts from day one.
Um, so that's kind of like the first problem you wanna solve for. You want that feedback from your operations back to [00:47:00] design so that the next building we launch is actually a building they want. Mm-hmm. Um, so it, it- Commissioning is needed. Um, most people have it. We still don't know how to use it truly well-
Brad Bonavida: Yeah.
Niharika Kishore: Interesting ... uh, to deliver things we want.
Brad Bonavida: I think, I think the, my biggest takeaway from your description of why it's so much harder than the s- simplistic way I was, I was putting it is that I, I'm very narrowly talking about it as like the commissioning of the HVAC and the controls and everything that an energy manager would relate to, yet you're also commissioning this as a office or f- well, fulfillment center might be even a better...
You're talking about the conveyor belts, you're talking about the shelving. There's all these other aspects and, you know, the energy and getting the, the building systems right is just a tiny piece of that.
Niharika Kishore: Yeah. And I mean, now you put robotics in them. We've got robots walking around at the buildings.
They need a certain kind of concrete or a certain kind of design of the building. So we need that feedback back to [00:48:00] design. Um, and so, so once, once you've got that feedback going, yes, commissioning is gonna work because then we know who wants what. We can put it as a requirement in that commission, think of it as a commissioning checklist, and have the agents walk through and make sure everything's getting delivered.
But we're not there yet.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. I, yeah, I can only imagine how difficult it is at scale and, and, uh, you know, so much of what you've been talking about is the scale that you deal with of doing this at so many pl- locations at once. Uh, with that being said, my final hard question for you before we go to carve-outs is what can someone with a smaller portfolio that's not the size of Amazon's take away from the approach that you guys are using across all of these buildings and all these different systems?
Niharika Kishore: Um, I think the first thing is having a construction program manager provide that horizontal view. Um, I'm the only person on most projects that's also talking to whoever thought about the project to the, and the operations teams. I'm talking to the entire life cycle of a building from when we're thinking about it to [00:49:00] when it gets launched to when it gets retrofitted and relaunched and handed over to operations again.
A building will change ownership at all of these different stages, um, from thinking to design to pre-construction, construction startup operations. Um, requirements for each of these different teams are different. And so there needs to be the horizontal view so that I now know, okay, when design's talking about this, that's not what the operations team- Yeah
wants. I'm that connective tissue- I love that ... uh, back to championing all of these different teams' requirements. They're all owners on the program. Mm-hmm. My job is being the owner's rep on this program and make sure we're launching it successfully within budget, and we don't want change orders. We don't wanna have to deal with demos.
We don't wanna have to deal with additional vendors, um, if we don't want to, and so on. And so this, this horizontal visibility is very important. Yeah. Equally important is the vertical visibility because only the construction manager knows what are the [00:50:00] different challenges at their sites. That if I have 20 people-- If I have five people renovating the restroom, I have six more people doing the break room, the GC's at max capacity.
So do we need to switch, uh, resourcing around to make sure, uh, we can still deliver all of these programs on schedule? So equally important is that vertical view at every site to make sure that all of, all of what the requirements for that site are being met, um, sustainably.
Brad Bonavida: Fantastic answer. I completely agree.
Okay, cool. Let's, uh, let's wrap there. We'll do some carve-outs really quick. Um, I, I'll go first. Uh, for, for my... for our deep fans who listen to all the podcasts, last time I was talking about my, uh, my saga with a dog door that I need to install. I installed the dog door this weekend, so I cut a, a giant gaping hole in the side wall of our house and installed it.
Now my problem is that the, the house is... the inside floor is a lot higher than the floor of, uh, or the ground level outside, so the dog door's floating two feet above the ground, so the dog, my dog [00:51:00] can't jump out of there. So the project for next weekend is to build a ramp so he can actually get out. So by the next podcast, I'm hoping that I'm not, no longer talking about the dog door project saga that I've been on.
How about you?
Niharika Kishore: Um, I, um... So background context, I had a baby six months ago, so I'm still figuring out- Congratulations. Thank you. We've talked about that,
Brad Bonavida: yeah.
Niharika Kishore: Thank you. So I'm still figuring out what life is, um, to a six-month-old mom who is also a wife, who also wants to have a really stellar, rocking career.
Um, so I'm trying to figure out what that new balance looks like, um, so I'm not, I'm not cheating on any one of those, uh, different roles. Uh, apart from that, I am also focusing on making time for myself. Um, to anyone else that has young babies and toddlers knows it's very hard to get lost in all of the household chores and all of these different things that need to happen, um, at home.
It's equally important to find time for yourself. [00:52:00] Um, so I'm finally getting back to painting. Um, I started my new painting last week. I hope to finish it before the end of this year. That's a 2026 goal for me. Nice. Um, but I do this thing called Madhubani henna painting. It's a, it's an art form I developed myself.
It's a, a cross between an ancient Indian art form, which has a lot of figurines with fine, uh, pen work, uh, fused with the henna art, the things we put on our hands in, um- Yeah ... in the Indian culture. So I do that with pen on paper. So I'm trying to do- That is awesome ... a little bit more of that this year.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. I think that you are a role model to any, any mother career aspiring person out there who's doing a whole... you know, juggling so many things at once. Um, and my only ask for you is please send me a picture of this painting when you're, when you're ready to. That sounds really cool, so that's
Niharika Kishore: great.
Absolutely will do. And then side by side, I'm trying to get my baby to eat solids for the first time. [00:53:00]
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. So
Niharika Kishore: that's going.
Brad Bonavida: I- All right. That's great. Cool. Well, this has been super fun. Thank you so much for being on it, and thank you everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.
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.
This is a great piece!
I agree.