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Goldman Sachs turned “smart buildings” into a governed business unit—so a small person core team could run 15 parallel workstreams instead of slow, one-off projects
Goldman Sachs stopped treating smart buildings as a series of one-off projects—and reorganized them as a governed internal business unit so work could scale without slowing down.
At NexusCon ’25, Tim Cook, VP of Operational Technology at Goldman Sachs, described how the firm now runs a global smart building program across roughly 94 sites, spanning retrofits, new construction, and net-new deployments. The shift was driven by speed and control. “Dragging a project on over years is a far bigger risk than you could imagine,” Cook said.
Instead of sequential rollouts, Goldman runs dozens of initiatives in parallel. “This is one use case to do 15 of these at one time,” Cook said, adding that another 10 similarly complex workstreams were already queued for the next six months.
A small execution core—about eight people—uses shared program artifacts to surface where delivery breaks: owner decisions, schedule risk, QA issues, and vendor coordination problems. “We literally even track down to the meeting level,” said smart building consultant Matt White of Intellibuild, describing how unresolved owner decisions are flagged and rolled into program reporting before they stall deployment.
That structure matters most when requirements change midstream. “You already got buy-in… and then a shifting requirement changes,” said Jeremy Richmond of consultant MSIe. “That didn’t work. Now what’s your fallback?” Goldman built qualification labs, standardized intake processes, and multiple technical fallbacks so teams could pivot without stopping work globally.
The takeaway for owners: scaling smart buildings isn’t about better tools alone. It’s about treating delivery, risk, and decisions as a system that can survive speed.
Learn more:
- Watch the full presentation from NexusCon 2025
- Sign up for the Nexus Labs newsletter to get five similar stories for owners every otherWednesday:
Goldman Sachs stopped treating smart buildings as a series of one-off projects—and reorganized them as a governed internal business unit so work could scale without slowing down.
At NexusCon ’25, Tim Cook, VP of Operational Technology at Goldman Sachs, described how the firm now runs a global smart building program across roughly 94 sites, spanning retrofits, new construction, and net-new deployments. The shift was driven by speed and control. “Dragging a project on over years is a far bigger risk than you could imagine,” Cook said.
Instead of sequential rollouts, Goldman runs dozens of initiatives in parallel. “This is one use case to do 15 of these at one time,” Cook said, adding that another 10 similarly complex workstreams were already queued for the next six months.
A small execution core—about eight people—uses shared program artifacts to surface where delivery breaks: owner decisions, schedule risk, QA issues, and vendor coordination problems. “We literally even track down to the meeting level,” said smart building consultant Matt White of Intellibuild, describing how unresolved owner decisions are flagged and rolled into program reporting before they stall deployment.
That structure matters most when requirements change midstream. “You already got buy-in… and then a shifting requirement changes,” said Jeremy Richmond of consultant MSIe. “That didn’t work. Now what’s your fallback?” Goldman built qualification labs, standardized intake processes, and multiple technical fallbacks so teams could pivot without stopping work globally.
The takeaway for owners: scaling smart buildings isn’t about better tools alone. It’s about treating delivery, risk, and decisions as a system that can survive speed.
Learn more:
- Watch the full presentation from NexusCon 2025
- Sign up for the Nexus Labs newsletter to get five similar stories for owners every otherWednesday:
This is a great piece!
I agree.