Every Wednesday, we send out "the single best resource on technology for buildings", Nexus' Founder Note. Each issue includes a note from Nexus Labs Founder, James Dice, along with a podcast, featured speaker, an event list, and more. Sign up today.
This NexusCon 2025 session features Conor Cleary of Tefiki tackling one of the hardest problems in smart buildings: how to drive real energy and comfort improvements in the 87% of buildings that lack modern controls.
This NexusCon 2025 session dives into Rémy Cointreau’s headquarters in Times Square and how the team tackled energy efficiency without ripping out their entire building stack.
NexusCon 2025’s “Kickstarting Energy Savings” session goes straight after the problem the Untapped 87% white paper laid out: small-to-mid-size buildings are most of the building stock, and most still don’t have real controls or monitoring.
This NexusCon 2025 panel, moderated by Rachel Kennedy (Solutions Engineer, KODE Labs), brings together April Yi (Director, Digital Engineering, Microsoft), Niharika Kishore (Sr. Sustainability Specialist, Amazon), and Thomas Grant (Global Manager of Energy and DTV Energy, Wendy’s) to unpack what “AI for energy management” actually means in practice.
At NexusCon 2025, April Yi, Director of Digital Engineering at Microsoft, walked through how her team is using machine learning to dynamically control HVAC start and stop times across roughly 50 buildings.
At NexusCon 2025, Blake Standen (Director, Technical Sales/Business Development, Brainbox AI) and Niharika Kishore (Sr. Sustainability Specialist, Amazon) walked through how Amazon is trying to squeeze real HVAC savings out of an operating portfolio that can’t pause for retrofits.
Justin Owen, Interim Director of Plant Operations at Weber State University, walked through how a public university built a long-term energy program that CFOs actually trust.
This NexusCon 2025 session digs into a year-long pilot that paired BuildingLogix FDD with HEAPY’s Intelligent Building Management Service across complex university buildings.
At NexusCon 2025, Mike Bendewald, Vice President of Sustainability at Mantis Innovation, and Jenny Gerson, Senior Director of Sustainability at Databank, broke down what it actually takes to make energy efficiency pencil out in data centers.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation takes a different format: a live debate on whether grid-interactive buildings are truly ready for broad deployment—or still stuck in research and pilots.
In this NexusCon 2025 presentation, Alex Perlman, Director of Energy Storage Investment & Development at Prologis, explains how one of the world’s largest logistics landlords is rethinking buildings as energy infrastructure.
In this NexusCon '25 presentation, Michael Rohan, Principal of Energy & Engineering at Northwell Health, and Nicholas Burgess, Head of Building Intelligence at JB&B, unpack how a large healthcare system is rethinking energy storage and grid interactivity.
In this presentation, Andrew Vavoulis, Controls Engineer at HGA Architects & Engineers, and Bill McGuire, Cofounder of ACE IoT Solutions, walk through how they put grid-interactive building strategies into practice with the City of Madison.
Will Brouwer, Group Product Manager at WiredScore, breaks down what smart building benchmarking data is actually telling landlords and asset managers right now.
In this NexusCon session, Owen Dalton, Smart Buildings Leader at The Clarient Group, breaks down what happens after an owner gets executive approval for a smart building program—and why so many initiatives stall once they hit middle management.
In this session, Christian Nielsen, Head of Property Technology and Innovation at Low Tide Properties, walks through how his team rethought the foundation of their smart neighborhood program. Instead of beginning with technology—an approach that had repeatedly led to misaligned investments—Christian rebuilt the process around user journeys for residents, operators, and property managers.
Epic Investment Services—a Canadian property management firm with 26.6 million square feet under management—hit a wall. Their teams weren't using their existing maintenance platform.
Smart building maturity means treating tech as essential infrastructure, not a discretionary expense, focusing on foundational connectivity, cybersecurity, and organizational fluency.
Reporting live from NexusCon 2025 in Denver. Building owners discuss moving smart buildings programs from budget struggles to operational integration. Real case studies, no vendor hype, honest conversations about what actually works.
Water systems remain the least digitized building infrastructure despite posing major risks—from catastrophic leaks to Legionella outbreaks. New non-invasive sensors now offer targeted solutions without requiring comprehensive building automation, transforming water from a utility bill line item into a managed asset with real-time visibility.
Most building owners think they're doing device management—they're not. Financial institutions are spending hundreds of millions on emergency remediation because nobody actually owns this problem.
Episode 186 is a conversation with Brad Bonavida and James Dice from Nexus Labs, as well as Leslie Beu from Clockworks Analytics and Reed Powell from MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions.
While utilities and policymakers promote “demand flexibility” as a simple way for buildings to cut costs and support the grid, the reality is far messier: siloed systems, manual playbooks, and misaligned incentives make coordination far harder than theory suggests. Emerging solutions—like aggregators handling grid relationships, automation providers standardizing control, and readiness assessments that reveal real system capabilities—are making progress, but success today comes from solving specific pieces of the puzzle rather than achieving full multi-system optimization.
Poor cellular coverage is the number one tenant complaint in many commercial buildings, and DAS (Distributed Antenna Systems) is often proposed as the solution. But with costs ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, building owners need to understand what they're really getting. Our panel explores the critical questions every owner should ask before investing in DAS technology in our latest Nexus APAC building owner meetup.
Building service contracts are shifting from hourly billing to outcome-based models. Learn what building owners should ask when renewing HVAC and controls maintenance contracts to drive better results and predictable costs.
Discover how smart sensors, air quality monitoring, and environmental data can transform your building into a productivity-boosting, health-optimizing workspace that saves money while making people measurably smarter.
A practical guide for facility managers of small commercial buildings on why choosing the right partner before the product is the key to implementing affordable, simple, and scalable building automation systems.
In mission-critical facilities where downtime is the most important KPI, this editorial explores how compliance dashboards, fault detection, and resilient BAS design help facility managers stay online and ahead of problems.
Episode 182 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Episode 182 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
It seems that everyone claims to be a Master Systems Integrator (MSI) these days, but few truly are. There's a lot of focus on who the MSI should be rather than on what the function should deliver. Rob Huntington from Emeseye & Mike Dowling from Operational Intelligence unpack the role of the Master System Integrator (MSI) in our latest Nexus APAC event
Every supermarket operator wants to cut energy costs and prevent equipment failures, but Woolworths Group (nicknamed “Woolies”) has actually done it at an unprecedented scale.
Innovative solutions are emerging that promise to liberate building owners from these closed ecosystems. In particular, one buzzword is on everyone’s lips as a beacon of hope for “freedom from lock-in”: open source. But what does “open source” really mean in the context of building automation, and can it deliver on its promise of flexibility and owner control?
Episode 181 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Nicholas Dumoulin from Dream Real Estate. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Months, if not years, into the design process, this was the first time that integration between two systems was even considered by anyone but the designer who had written the note.
This session will contain Pecha-Kucha style 7-minute quick dives into different technology that is on the horizon and starting to make its way into the world’s most advanced buildings.
Today's tools have not been very user-centric for the people on the ground, so those people ignore them—and the hoped-for efficiency and data insights never materialize. Now that’s starting to change. Gamification, AI, and behavioral psychology principles influence users to return frequently, spend more time on the platform, and even enjoy doing so.
This is the NexusCon session dedicated to the construction phase of the smart buildings process. We’ll hear different case studies providing lessons learned and success stories of new construction smart buildings strategies.
The Buyer and Vendor Symposiums were designed to be networking, problem-solving, and brainstorming sessions, with one room exclusively for buyers of building technology and one room exclusively for vendors of building technology. Then, we removed the wall separating the rooms and let the two groups hash out the obstacles to tech adoption together.
New solutions are aiming to give building owners the benefits of a horizontal architecture (more choice, flexibility, and resilience) while minimizing the burden on their thinly stretched teams.
Episode 180 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Chris Tjiattas from Walmart. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Episode 179 features James Dice, Rosy and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Andrew Rogers from ACE IoT Solutions. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Episode 178 features James Dice, Rosy and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs, as well as Keilly Witman from Refrigerant Management Solutions. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Episode 177 is a conversation with Keith Gipson from Facil.AI and Kenny Seeton from California State University Dominguez Hills.
This session will explore how FDD is transforming maintenance strategies, enabling building operators to anticipate issues before they escalate, optimizing performance, and reducing operational costs, all while enhancing the tenant experience.
Grocery facility managers are fed up with siloed software for maintenance, refrigerant tracking, leak detection, and sustainability—here’s why it’s failing them and how integrated platforms are changing the game.
This session will provide practical insights into how technology and innovative practices can be leveraged to meet decarbonization goals, offering valuable takeaways for those looking to make a similar impact in their own operations.
The pressure is on to translate all this raw sensor data into safer, more effective, more engaging workplaces—and to prove it’s worth the ongoing cost of the IoT stack. In this next phase, the focus shifts from where people are to what they’re doing, what the environment is like, and what to do about it.
Learn how Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) transforms higher ed facilities, improving energy efficiency, reducing maintenance costs, and enhancing campus comfort
Discover how energy management software automates the tedious tasks energy managers face—data wrangling, utility bill validation, and compliance reporting—so they can focus on efficiency projects and sustainability goals.
This session highlights case studies from HH Angus and Manulife, US Green Building Council, the General Services Administration, and Kaiterra, as well as Kilroy Realty on different types of sensors.
This session focuses on the principles necessary to keep your smart building program afloat through the only thing that will be constant: change in people dynamics.
Buildings account for more than 50% of electricity demand and 40% of carbon emissions worldwide. The smart buildings industry is the group approaching these issues head on. We see it daily within our community: building owners willing to be early adopters and take a le
Episode 176 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Episode 175 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Episode 174 features James Dice, Rosy and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Episode 173 of the Nexus Podcast features the Nexus Labs team breaking down some of the top stories from the past 2 weeks relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Smart building innovation is increasingly driven by the seamless integration of diverse technologies and data models. This session will explore how open communication protocols, unified data models, independent data layers, and ontology alignment can break down silos and enable smarter, more responsive systems.
Faced with what seemed like an inevitable $11 million expansion at one facility, T-Mobile relied on its innovative use of smart building technology to uncover a surprising alternative.
In this session, we'll hear from some of the corporate leaders on how they've built a strategy around people, processes, and technology that is leading them to corporate buildings of the future.
This session will provide practical insights into how technology and innovative practices can be leveraged to meet decarbonization goals, offering valuable takeaways for those looking to make a similar impact in their own operations.
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) consistently rank as one of the most sought-after smart building technologies among our community of building owners. Yet, when we asked these same leaders how they’ve successfully implemented BESS, the response was… silence.
Head over to Nexus Connect and see what’s new in the community. Don’t forget to check out the latest member-only events.
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