Kelly Sinclair

A note on perspective: this is a researched piece from a media and industry-reporting perspective, rather than a controls-engineering one. I aim to connect conversations we’re seeing at AutomatedBuildings.com. The question hiding under the AI conversation Building automation has been trying to solve versions of one problem for decades: how do systems from different eras, vendors, and disciplines exchange information without forcing the owner to rebuild everything around a single supplier?

AutomatedBuildings.com has never been a one-voice publication. For decades it has run on the perspectives of engineers, consultants, facility managers, and technologists who show up because they have something worth saying about where this industry is headed. That community just grew by one.

Not literally a power plant. But increasingly an energy campus that generates, consumes, stores, and manages power within one operating environment, alongside the compute it was built to house. For much of conventional building automation practice, the electrical meter has functioned as an operational boundary: power arrives, and the building manages what happens downstream. That boundary has never been absolute.