Ken Sinclair Founder/Publisher/Owner
automatedbuildings.com/author/ksinclair
AutomatedBuildings.com
#automatedbuildings
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Ken Sinclair
Evolving Into What? The Rise of the Virtual Building Whisperer
Monday Live! | October 26, 2026 | Evolving Skill Sets: Evolving Into What? October’s Monday Live! discussions have explored the changing skills behind smarter buildings. This week’s conversation challenged a deeper assumption: we keep talking about evolving, but do we actually know what we are evolving into? The answer may lie less in acquiring new skills and more in capturing the expertise we already have, making it trustworthy, and putting it to work.
The value of simulation for education
The shift from static documentation—paper punch cards decades ago, and static PDFs, manuals, and instructional videos today—into dynamic, AI-driven simulations represents a fundamental evolution in how we understand complex systems. When engineers first queued decks of 80-column punch cards into mainframes running early DOE-2 or BLAST engines, the true breakthrough wasn’t just getting an energy number out at the end.
Become the Building
We Turned a Greenbuild Audience Into a Knowledge Graph. Here’s What Happened. Greenbuild 2026, New York City | Part 1 of a two-article series What if, instead of talking about intelligent buildings, we asked people to become one? At the Greenbuild AI Summit in New York, participants became buildings, spaces, equipment, occupants, facility managers, communities, and AI agents.
What the Video Skips: Free Training Simulators for the Generational Handover
I build free training simulators from manuals and field posts so new techs can learn why equipment does what it does before they touch a live plant. This month on Monday Live!, the panel talked about the generational handover in our industry. YouTube is now the first tool many field techs reach for. A video shows how to fix the problem in front of you. It rarely shows what should be happening inside the equipment. On October 26, the panel talked about these simulators as one way to fill that gap.
From a 48-Page Manual to a Tested Simulator in One Evening
How I used AI to turn the Nailor EZvav IOM into a nine-lab training simulator, and what three rounds of checking caught that reading alone never would. I build training simulators the same way every time. I write the requirements. An AI agent writes the code. Reviewers check the result. EZV-01, my simulator for Nailor EZvav digital VAV controls, followed that path. It also showed me where the real work sits. The source is IOM-EZVAVINST, Nailor’s 48-page installation and operation manual.
Transforming AI into a revenue stream
Discussion: Using AI as a revenue stream. Rapidly changing technology and societal shifts are impacting various professions and infrastructure, adding sellable Value The monetization of AI has shifted from simple efficiency gains (cost-cutting) to direct value creation and recurring revenue engines.
Wanted Cyber-Physical Engineers
Yesterday’s MondayLive chat featured Duncan from the UK, who explained why he was excited as a young practitioner about the industry; part of that excitement was the empowerment he felt in his craft.
The Great Generational Handoff Is Not a Baton Pass
Building automation is losing decades of experience just as AI is changing what the next generation needs to know. The challenge is not simply passing knowledge along. It is rethinking how the industry works, teaches, and attracts talent. October’s MondayLive! Conversations have focused on evolving skill sets. First came the impact of AI on the people behind smarter buildings. Then came the question of who will build systems that are learning to snap together.
The Real ROI of Overseas BAS Graphics Outsourcing
A lower quote does not always mean a lower project cost. For years, companies have sent BAS graphics, floor plans, and related production work overseas to reduce costs. The initial savings can look attractive. But how often does anyone go back and calculate what the completed project actually cost? QA Graphics sees the other side of that calculation. A significant portion of its work involves correcting or rebuilding graphics originally produced overseas.
When the Grid Says Reduce and the Data Center Says No: Who Governs the Consequence?
Execution Governance at Machine Speed Across AI Infrastructure, Electrical Grids, and Smart Cities By Greggory Don Butler Founder, TA14 Authority Governance Institution Contributing Editor, AutomatedBuildings.com It is 3:17 PM on a summer afternoon. A regional electrical grid is approaching an operating constraint. Demand is rising. Available flexibility is limited. A grid coordination platform requests 20 megawatts of demand reduction within ten minutes.
AHR 2027 Chicago | Sneak Peek Free Education Sessions
Kerri Lee Sinclair (Editorial Board Chair) sits down to have a conversation with Ken Sinclair, Scott Cochrane, and Brad White on their annual read on where building automation is actually heading: what has changed, what remains stubbornly familiar, and how the industry should govern AI as it takes on a greater role in building decisions.
The Great Generational Handoff
The building automation and controls industry stands at an unprecedented demographic and technological crossroads. A generation of practitioners who built the industry from brass pneumatic restrictors and early Direct Digital Control (DDC) mainframes to networked BACnet systems is approaching retirement. At the same time, an incoming cohort of software engineers, data practitioners, and cloud-native thinkers is entering building operations.
Data Center Boom: The Opportunity
AI is digital. Heat is physical. The controls industry has a direct role in the infrastructure that connects them. Every watt used by a server eventually becomes heat. Removing it has always mattered in a data center, but the higher densities associated with AI are changing where heat is captured and how cooling systems must respond. For building automation professionals, the opportunity lies in making those systems dependable, from the rack to the cooling plant.
Buildings Are Learning to Snap Together. Who Will Build with Them?
Monday Live! | October 12, 2026 | Evolving Skill Sets: The Future of Integration Monday Live! is a free weekly industry roundtable, held Mondays at 3 p.m. ET, where building automation professionals work out what smarter buildings really require. Every session is written up here on AutomatedBuildings.com. . . . Integration has always been the craft of making one system talk to another, one project at a time.
Product Spotlight – New!
NEW: PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT Put your new product in front of the building automation industry One image. One link. Up to 150 words. Published on AutomatedBuildings.com and promoted through our LinkedIn page. INTRODUCTORY LAUNCH PRICE $295 USD per listing Available for submissions received by January 31, 2027. Why New products get lost in press releases and social feeds.
The Future of Integration: Who Authorizes the Consequence?
The next frontier of intelligent buildings is not simply autonomous operation. It is admissible execution. By Greggory Don Butler Founder, TA-14 Authority Governance Institution Architect of Admissible Execution Architecture An independent companion editorial to Ken Sinclair’s October 8, 2026 article, “The Future of Integration,” published by AutomatedBuildings.com.
the future of integration
The future of integration is the transformation of the integrator from a protocol plumber into a semantic data architect and autonomous systems orchestrator. For decades, integration meant connecting disparate physical hardware—pulling RS-485 cables, mapping registers, setting up BACnet gateways, and translating proprietary field-bus protocols so points could appear on a central graphical user interface (GUI). That era of manual point-to-point binding has reached its limit.
Who Owns Your Building’s Data? Why Data Sovereignty Matters More Than Ever
As AI becomes more important to building operations, control over operational data could determine how much freedom building owners have to choose the technologies they use next. AI is forcing companies to take a harder look at their data, and how much control they actually have over it. A recent IBM study of 1,000 senior executives found that 71% believe switching their primary AI vendor or model would be difficult.
Spotlight on retrofits: Breathing new life into older buildings with building automation
According to the Canadian Green Building Strategy, most buildings that exist today will still be standing decades from now. And the United Nations reports that only half of all buildings that will exist by 2050 have been built. That means retrofitting existing structures is just as important as designing new ones—especially when it comes to energy efficiency, comfort, and sustainability.
What a Dry Coil Buys
The owner’s angle. What the deck promises, what it admits, and what the energy model shows. An owner or facility manager lives with the ceiling, the maintenance route, and the utility bill. I read the deck a third time with those in mind. The summary slide sorts the benefits into four groups. Efficiency. ECM terminal fan motors, sensible cooling with warmer water, and zone-level DCV built in. Comfort. Independent zone temperature control and active zone humidity control. Low maintenance.
Capital Efficiency in Building AI: How Facil.AI Stacks Up
I always pay attention when Joseph Aamidor publishes something that puts numbers around the building technology market. Joe, of Aamidor Consulting, provides smart insights and trusted advice to built environment professionals, investors, and executives, and one of his recent comparisons caught my attention. He looked at several digital twin and building operations platform companies through a simple capital efficiency measure: funding raised per square foot deployed.
Cybersecurity Starts in the Specification
The specifying engineer’s role in secure smart buildings October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and I’d like to bring the conversation into the design development meeting in the consulting engineer’s office. When we specify a building automation system, we spend a lot of time on sequences of operation, equipment performance, graphics, and interoperability.
The Skill Set Is Changing: What AI Means for the People Behind Smarter Buildings
Building automation has always been a field where experience matters. You learn what a bad actuator sounds like. You know when a sensor reading does not make sense. You recognize the difference between a controls problem, a mechanical problem, and a specification problem. That knowledge is not going away, but the way people access it, apply it, and build on it is changing quickly. That was the focus of the latest Monday Live discussion, part of its October theme on evolving skill sets.
When Building Data Is Wrong, What Should AI Do?
From the AutomatedBuildings Editorial Board Real buildings rarely provide perfect information. Sensors drift. Occupancy changes. Forecasts move. Equipment is overridden. Systems disagree. Some data is missing, and some looks perfectly reasonable even when it is not. That is normal building operation. As AI takes on a larger role in analyzing and acting on building data, what matters is how it performs under those conditions, not just when the inputs are clean and everything behaves as expected.
Evolving Skill Sets
create an information piece summarizing the exponential growth and diversification of topics related to AI and automated buildings, noting how this expansion affects focus areas including MondayLive and C4SB. The convergence of artificial intelligence and building automation systems (BAS) has evolved from basic algorithmic scheduling and cloud dashboards into an expansive ecosystem of physical AI, edge compute, and autonomous operation.
What Does Your Building Let AI Know — and What Does It Let AI Do?
Buildings have spent decades learning how to talk. Sensors measure temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, pressure, particulate matter, airflow, electrical consumption and equipment state. Building automation systems collect those measurements. Dashboards visualize them. Analytics compare them. Digital twins represent them.
Human Trust vs Machine Trust in Smart Buildings: AI Governance, Liability, and Audit Trails
Monday Live! September 28, 2026, brought together industry voices for a candid discussion on one of the most pressing questions in smart buildings: What does it actually mean to trust a machine? The conversation moved from self-driving cars and elevators to governance, liability, and the hidden risks of AI prompts. Watch the full episode at MondayLive.org. The panel opened with a fundamental tension. Human trust is personal, accumulated over time, and forgiving. Machine trust operates differently.
Data Center Boom: The Opportunity
AI is digital. Heat is physical. The controls industry has a direct role in the infrastructure that connects them. Every watt used by a server eventually becomes heat. Removing it has always mattered in a data center, but the higher densities associated with AI are changing where heat is captured and how cooling systems must respond. For building automation professionals, the opportunity lies in making those systems dependable, from the rack to the cooling plant.
A Building That Can Say What It Is: What ASHRAE 223P Suggests About the Next Decade
Somewhere in a mechanical room, a point is named SAT. A technician knows it means supply air temperature. A new analytics tool does not, and neither does an AI agent. The gap is old. What has changed is who, or what, is now asking. ASHRAE Standard 223P is the industry’s most detailed attempt to close it. The Open223 user documentation explains the standard through five ideas: type, topology, composition, telemetry, and characteristics.
Why are we acting like AI is new?
As the industry debates AI governance, it is time to address a fundamental question: Why do we act like AI is a new phenomenon? AI has been present in our industry for nearly a decade—from “fuzzy logic” in the 80s to modern deployments by Carrier, Siemens, and Honeywell. It is time to move past the debate and focus on execution. The “MondayLive!” crew and much of the industry are currently obsessed with (human) AI governance.
The Biggest Release in CUBE History Is Here
Over the past year, our team has been rebuilding CUBE from the ground up—not simply changing how it looks, but rethinking how a BMS contractor should operate when everything is connected in one platform. Today, that new CUBE is here Every screen has been rebuilt. Workflows have been simplified. Information is easier to see. And an entirely new Marketplace transforms CUBE from a software platform into an ecosystem of applications built around your business.
FROM “TRUST US” TO “SHOW THE EVIDENCE”
Greggory Don Butler Founder, TA-14 Authority | TA-14 Academy A building should not have to trust the story of what happened. The record should preserve what was true, why intervention was justified, what changed, and whether the intended result occurred. For purposes of this work, TA-14 uses HVACD/R — Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, Dehumidification and Refrigeration — because dehumidification is not an incidental subset of air conditioning.
Why Analytics Failures Get Decided Long Before Anyone’s Thinking About Analytics
A lot of the failed analytics rollouts I’ve been called into trace back to the same moment, and it’s rarely the moment anyone expects. It’s not a bad algorithm, a stubborn facility manager, or an underpowered edge device. It’s a tender document written two or three years earlier, by a specifying engineer who had never heard of the analytics platform that would eventually try to use the network they were designing, because there was usually no reason for them to have heard of it.
From Study Notes to Working Models: What a Reversing Valve Taught Me About Learning
A conversation that kept paying off In 2023 I sent a message to Tony Mormino. I had a problem with how we were managing data in our Computerized Maintenance Management System, and he had spent years explaining HVAC to large audiences. I figured he would have a view on how to make technical information usable. He did. We talked about CMMS data, and then we talked about content. His advice on LinkedIn was simple. You can share the same information more than once. Space it out.
Enhancing DOAS Compressor Performance with a 36-Point BACnet Controller
A school campus in South Carolina was facing a costly and persistent HVAC issue: repeated failures of compressors and their associated variable frequency drives (VFDs) within its dedicated outdoor air units (DOAUs). Since the facility was commissioned, the DOAU compressors and VFDs have required frequent replacement. A detailed investigation identified the root cause as overly aggressive modulation control from the existing control system.
THE GRAVITY BETWEEN US
By Greggory Don Butler Founder, TA-14 Authority | Contributing Editor, AutomatedBuildings.com Something happened over the last seven months that I don’t think any of us planned. It didn’t begin with a consortium. There was no committee. Nobody signed a memorandum of understanding. Nobody agreed to merge architectures, surrender intellectual ownership or put one organization in charge of everybody else.
Protected: When Buildings Understand Each Other, Who Is Allowed to Act?
Kimon Onuma Kimon Onuma is a technology strategist with over 37 years at the intersection of the built environment, data, and systems interoperability. He is the founder of ONUMA, Inc., a pioneer in cloud-based solutions for BIM, GIS, and Digital Twins, delivering cloudBIM in 2000 when most still shipped CDs. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and Co-Chair of the Buildings Committee at buildingSMART USA, Kimon has long championed open standards and owner-driven digital ecosystems.
When Machines Decide: Building Trust in an Agent-to-Agent World
MondayLive! is a weekly conversation at mondaylive.org where the building automation community discusses the technologies, standards, and ideas shaping the industry. What happens when software is no longer simply recommending an action, but is authorized to purchase, negotiate, allocate resources, or change the operation of a building? That question moved to the center of this week’s MondayLive! discussion.
THE CROSSING IS NOT THE PERMISSION
By Greggory Don Butler For most of the history of automated buildings, interoperability has meant getting things to talk. Different manufacturers. Different protocols. Different point names. Different databases. Different generations of equipment. Different ideas about what the building is. That problem is not solved, but the industry has made extraordinary progress.
Why BAS Graphics Need a Lifecycle Standard—Not Just a Project Standard
Why the visual layer needs a lifecycle standard, not just a project standard Building automation graphics are usually built near the end of a project. By that point, schedules are tight, budgets have been picked over, and everyone is focused on getting the system accepted. That creates a predictable problem. The graphics may be good enough to complete the project, but nobody has made a plan for the next 10 or 20 years. The BAS will change. Equipment will be replaced. Buildings will be renovated.
Governed Connectivity Across Trust Boundaries
Skip to content Linkedin Twitter Pinterest Facebook Home » Posts » Governed Connectivity Across Trust Boundaries explain the significance in this press release https://www.ostera.org/news with the thoughts shared in this post https://www.automatedbuildings.com/2026/09/monday-live-september-trust-autonomous-buildings/ The September 17, 2026 press release from OSTERA (launching the CNS/CP Working Group) and the September 15, 2026 Monday Live discussion on AutomatedBuildings.com directly...
From “Installed” to “Verified”: The Real Story of Commissioning in Smart Buildings
A BAS screen can look healthy while the physical building is wrong. The next step in smart buildings is not simply more data. It is making sure that the digital system actually operates the building as intended. In building automation, “online” is an easy word. “Verified” is harder. A controller can be communicating. A graphic can be populated. Trends can be moving. An AHU can be running.
Monday Live Returns: Why September’s Theme Is Trust
Monday Live is the smart buildings industry’s weekly open conversation—a virtual gathering where practitioners, technologists, and systems thinkers work through the future of smarter buildings together. The community reconvened this week after the summer hiatus, launching a fresh season of Monday Live with a deceptively simple theme: Trust. As the session opened, the familiar grounding note was struck—Monday Live remains a space where views are personal, not corporate positions.
Universal Device Management Interface (UDMI)
I wanted to learn more about UDMI, so I chatted with my buddy Gemini. I thought it was worth sharing. Good background; looking forward to what this group is going to do provide background on this group https://www.c4sb.org/udmi The URL points to the Universal Device Management Interface (UDMI) project within the Coalition for Smarter Buildings Foundation (C4SB), hosted as a collaborative project under The Linux Foundation.
Stop Calling the Pilot Proven
A pilot succeeds. The dashboard works, data moves, and the customer gives a testimonial. By the next conference, the technology is “proven.” Proven where, under what conditions, and against which failure modes? Proven to recommend—or proven to execute? Building automation has no shortage of demonstrations. It has a shortage of bounded claims. AutomatedBuildings.com recently asked the industry to distinguish among promising, proven, and proven at scale.
Greenole Heads to Washington, D.C. for COSSBA Federal Advocacy
We’re excited to announce that Greenole will be participating in COSSBA Federal Advocacy, taking place September 21–23 in Washington, D.C., alongside school board leaders and education representatives from across the country. For us, this is more than an event. It’s an opportunity to contribute to the conversation about the future of education and how the buildings where students learn can become smarter, more efficient, and more connected to the learning experience.
Promising, Proven, Proven at Scale
Promising, proven, and proven at scale are not the same thing. That distinction matters more in building automation. New technologies are moving quickly into real buildings, particularly around AI, interoperability, cloud platforms, and energy management. Some are already delivering measurable value. Others are still being tested, refined, or proven in particular applications. We think the industry should be clearer about which is which. A successful pilot tells us something useful.
How EDGE Programming Has Evolved in the Last Decade
For more than fifteen years, the Sedona Framework has been one of the most recognizable edge programming environments in building automation. Thousands of controllers around the world still execute Sedona applications every second, proving how successful its original design was The requirements placed on today’s edge controllers are fundamentally different from those of 2008.
Meet Buildings’ Loudest Case for Open Data—the Architect in Black
The case Kimon Onuma, architect, Fellow of the AIA and founder of ONUMA, Inc., has run one byline on AutomatedBuildings.com almost every week for the past eighteen months, roughly sixty articles since February 2025, and together they read like a field notebook on what it actually takes to make a building’s information useful. “A building is an information system. The information belongs to the owner.
Elon’s Crazy Prediction That Actually Came True
By Keith Gipson, Founder and CEO, Facil.AI Tesla did not reinvent the car. It reinvented transportation. That distinction matters. For more than a century the automobile has been a machine that a person operates. The vehicle got faster, safer and more comfortable, but the basic arrangement never changed. A human sits behind a wheel and accepts the risk.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Ken
Contact Ken, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack