Inclusion of AI's Value in our Creative Communities Collisions

I am pleased with our last column, which links to many online resources (including educational YouTubes from AHR Expo, Atlanta) and discusses the creation of our Creative Community Collisions.

In that column, we linked to some article on AI and their effect on our building automation communities. In this month's column, we will talk about how the amazing value created by AI is poised to be a big part of our future creative collisions.

This article, What’s on the 2023 Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar? does a great job of providing a broad view of how AI will impact us and how soon.

I love the bull's eye graphic that shows how and when AI will hit us. At the center of that graphic is Edge AI—the explosion in vision in edge devices is something happening right now. This will come to our creative communities with the new edge devices we install or move into our space.

These new devices—self-contained, self-aware, self-learning—will view their surroundings with cameras and audio interaction, sensing everything. These devices could include thermography to sense critical temperatures, occupancy, and air quality. Imagine miniaturized, self-driving, Tesla-like building components moving into our spaces to carry their intelligence wherever they are positioned. The wireless network will be self-discovering and self-connecting.

This concept is easy to imagine in the large retrofit of a significant building from office to residential, including the decarbonization and electrification that will result from abandoning or hybridizing existing systems.

Personal conditioning devices that will automatically sense occupants and display real-time temperature, occupancy, air quality etc. Users will exercise complete control using an app and compatible voice recognition services. Old existing sensing will likely be abandoned.

This is a big headshake for our industry, but a possible evolution.

As existing buildings are most of our focus, Generative AI will likely be a big part of our future. Although the bull's eye shows its future further out in the timeline, several are now exploring and advocating its use.

In this article from McKinsey & Co., What is generative AI? we find some definitions:  

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) describes algorithms (such as ChatGPT) that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos. Recent new breakthroughs in the field have the potential to drastically change the way we approach content creation.

This this LinkedIn post, So You Think you Know the Future of AI and IoT? from contributing editor—and one of our AutomatedBuildings.com sponsors—David Sciarrino, gives some insights on where we might be headed:

We have all heard or read about ChatGPT, the new AI Chatbot system, but what could happen if you bundle ChatGPT with IoT and apply them to the Controls industry? We have written down some thoughts about it in our newest blog entry...

A comment leads to this post from Mohamad Kammoun, Sales Manager-Controls for Energy International Corporation: BAS and GPT: Toward Intelligent Buildings that talk.

Millions tried the conversational chat A.I. language model of GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) on the OpenAI interface. It is a remarkable thing. However, testing it on Building automation and operation use cases is yet to be discovered, at least with the OpenAI GPT model once they release its API so that programmers and innovators in that space get into the applications' mud...

Millions? yes, Millions. In this article Cost of Change, Sudha Jamthe discusses the adoption of AI and the pace of innovation:

Recently with #GenerativeAI, #ChatGPT has created quite a wave, with 100 million people chatting with the bot in the month of Jan, the fastest to 100 million user growth record in the Internet. This has created a lot of media buzz about a disruption in the search industry between Google and Microsoft as the latter has announced the integration of a version of ChatGPT into its Bing search. Here Google is the established company owning a global search market share of 91.88% followed by Microsoft at 3% of the search market.

This post, Smart Buildings – What can AI Teach Us? by Nicolas Waern, WINNIIO Consulting, talks about the limits of what AI can do and the need for subject matter experts:

I really like ChatGPT, and I tell my co-workers to become experts in it and to automate everything that they do. Trying their best to remove themselves from the equation. The marketing team, the AI team as well as the developers and project managers. Because there will be a point where AI will rule the world even more so than the news of AI, fake news will go rampant, and we will not be able to easily trust anything that we see (considering deep fakes) or what we hear if we trust that Microsoft can take three seconds of your voice and make it into something that sounds like you.

But we are not necessarily there yet. At least not when it comes to the future of Smart Buildings being predicted by AI. This is the benefit of having been in the business for some time and understanding what needs to be done. We already have the tools at our disposal, and we could solve all problems if we just understood how to apply them correctly in the correct order. Or how to invite the right people to innovate with our buildings and manage risk in the best way possible.

For March, our Monday Live! group is discussing AI impact. I recently posted last month's summary on the Smart Summit at AHRExpo Atlanta.

This month the conversation focuses on what actions industry players can undertake to move forward with the interoperable vision detailed at the Summit. We were joined by Greg Walker CEO at CABA, and Tim Vogel VP of Connected Solutions at KMC Controls. (You can register to join our next session at https://mondaylive.org.)

Because we recently celebrated International Women’s Day, I thought I’d wrap up this column with posts from two women who are helping shape the future of our industry. First, Liz Jacobs, Chief Marketing Officer, Automation Strategy & Performance, Inc., with Then, Now and the Future – A Women’s International Day Affirmation.

And second, this from Leadership coach Sally Helgesen is yet another call for inclusion in our Creative Communities.

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-sally-helgesen-shares-tools-for-achieving-workplace-inclusion