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.
Rosy Khalife, James Dice, and Brad Bonavida (Nexus Labs) kicked off NexusCon 2025 by explaining why the industry keeps cycling through disconnected priorities—BAS, energy, space utilization, health, decarb, cybersecurity—and why that fragmentation is now the real blocker to progress.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features Jay Wratten, Global Smart Places Lead at WSP, sharing how WSP rolled out desk-level occupancy tracking across 225 offices and 27,000+ assets worldwide.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation dives into how QuadReal is digitally enabling a growing multifamily portfolio by centralizing building operations and integrating tenant-facing technologies.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation brings together Joseph Allen, Director of the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program, and McClure Kelly, Senior Managing Director at Beacon Capital. They walk through how wildfire smoke became an indoor health problem—and why buildings, not people, are the first line of defense.
JJ Baird, VP at Airthings, walks through how leading organizations are using indoor environmental quality (IEQ) data to actually improve occupant health—without defaulting to “more ventilation” or over-relying on the BMS.
In this NexusCon 2025 presentation, Mike Robbins of Lockheed Martin’s Rotary and Mission Systems shares how his team deployed fault detection and diagnostics across six large sites totaling nearly 10 million square feet.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation breaks down how Lincoln Property Company operationalized fault detection across a commercial real estate portfolio—and why taking a “reverse approach” made it work at scale.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features Brandon Matthies, Head of Product at Nexa, and Adonis Woods, Director of Engineering at Hyatt Regency, walking through how a legacy hotel tackled unexplained water spikes and guest complaints tied to water pressure and temperature.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features Kelly Burke, Business Technology Consultant at JLL, sharing how she led an FDD pilot for Amazon across a highly diverse portfolio of 500+ buildings.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation breaks down how CU Anschutz replaced 319 failing Venturi air valves across active research and clinical spaces—without disrupting operations.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features James Donahue, Vice President of Customer Success at Clockworks Analytics, and Joe Coady, Manager at EllisDon, walking through how EllisDon used fault detection and diagnostics during the warranty phase of large healthcare projects.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features Rob Knight, Senior Smart Buildings Consultant at ARUP, and Robert Bray, Vice President & General Manager at Autodesk, tackling a problem most owners quietly accept as “just how it is”: losing critical building data at handover.
At NexusCon 2025, Brendan Robinson, Director of Facilities at Glenstone Museum, walked through how a high-performance cultural institution uses fault detection to protect priceless art while pushing energy performance far beyond industry norms.
At NexusCon 2025, Cristal Ortiz, Director of Workplace Sustainability & Engineering at LinkedIn, and Andrew Knueppel, Workplace Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, walked through LinkedIn’s four-year journey to scale fault detection across a global workplace portfolio.
At NexusCon 2025, Rob Engle, Utilities Engineer at Auburn University, and Dan Fink, VP of Engineering at BuildingLogiX, walked through Auburn’s decision to walk away from a 15-year FDD contract and rebuild the program from the ground up.
Cory Clarke (CPO, Neeve), Nate Benes (Director, OT & Engineering, University of Nebraska), and James Coleman (Building Automation Systems Analyst, Princeton University) came together at NexusCon 2025 for a candid debate on AI adoption in facilities management.
Northern Arizona University has been quietly laying the groundwork for an AI-enabled smart campus—and this NexusCon 2025 presentation walks through how it’s actually working in practice.
This NexusCon 2025 debate brings together presenters from the prior technology-enabled operations recordings to tackle a question everyone is quietly asking: will AI replace people in building operations, or simply change how the work gets done?
This NexusCon 2025 presentation breaks down how Analog Devices tackled fragmented BAS access, reactive operations, and limited portfolio visibility across more than 30 sites.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation walks through how Hudson Pacific Properties partnered with McDonnell-Miller and Clockworks Analytics to turn a struggling asset into a compliant, lower-EUI building.
In this NexusCon 2025 presentation, Nada Suti, VP of Sustainability, Innovation & National Programs at Epic Investment Services, joins Itay Oren, Co-founder & CEO of Visitt, to walk through Epic’s real-world process for replacing a legacy maintenance management system across a 26+ million sq ft portfolio spanning office, industrial, and retail.
Pete Swanson (Digital Technology Lead at Mott MacDonald) lays out a simple truth most project teams learn too late: if you don’t talk to users early, you’ll pay for it later.
In this NexusCon 2025 presentation, Eric Larsen, Consultant at CannonDesign, and Brian Green-Carson, Project Mechanical IV at CannonDesign, walk through what happened when their firm redesigned its Chicago flagship office—and decided to “eat its own dog food” on smart buildings.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation focuses on a problem most facilities teams are facing right now: how to introduce new workplace strategies, services, and technologies without triggering resistance or confusion.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features Michael MacMahon, Director of Intelligent Building Studio at Newcomb & Boyd, sharing real cybersecurity incidents he’s personally encountered across healthcare, higher ed, and commercial real estate.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features Joe Gaspardone, COO of Montgomery Technologies, sharing real cybersecurity incidents he’s personally encountered while responding to failures inside commercial buildings.
Tom Balme from Lendlease Investment Management and Cory Clarke, CPO at Neeve, walk through how Lendlease tackled OT cybersecurity across a portfolio of large commercial and retail assets.
At NexusCon 2025, Osman Saleem, Managing Director at Actimeta, walked through what OT cybersecurity actually looks like from the building owner’s seat—after the tools are bought, the network is “secured,” and the dashboards light up with thousands of vulnerabilities.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation captures a live owner-vendor debate on two questions many FM, IT, and OT leaders are quietly wrestling with: do data layers just move vendor lock-in up the stack—and should owners buy or build their own independent data layer?
This NexusCon 2025 presentation brings together Rick Szcodronski and Christopher Manna from Willow, Steve Burrell from Northern Arizona University, and Jose de Castro from Mapped to show how a large public university turned years of disconnected building data into something operators could actually use.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation walks through how Goldman Sachs is executing one of the most ambitious smart building programs in the industry—spanning 94 sites across retrofits, new construction, and live deployments.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation features Tadeh Hakopian (Program Manager, Amazon) and Niharika Kishore (Senior Sustainability Specialist, Amazon) walking through how Amazon uses digital twins across the full building lifecycle.
This NexusCon 2025 session brought together a group of deeply technical practitioners to showcase and pressure-test open-source tools shaping the future of OT in buildings.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation walks through a real troubleshooting story from a large global tech headquarters campus with 80+ buildings and 50,000 occupants.
This NexusCon 2025 presentation breaks down how Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) is tackling data chaos across LAX’s 20+ million square feet of terminals, parking structures, support buildings, and infrastructure.
Chris Tjattas, Program Manager of Smart Building Services at Walmart, shares a candid, owner-side perspective on how he personally evaluates the smart building controls market.
At NexusCon 2025, Leo Gabrek, Digital Advisory Consultant at Arup, and Kate Stelzel, Technology Operations Manager at JLL on the Delta Air Lines account, shared how LaGuardia Airport Terminal C implemented a building data layer to support daily operations.
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?
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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