Start with Data
A VAV box has points tagged zone, temp, sensor, air, discharge. Without knowing the manufacturer, what measurement does this represent?
What is the zone discharge air temperature (sensor reading)?
A tenant's phone generates a QR code at booking, and the elevator car is pre-called to the right floor before they badge in.
Power quality monitoring
What is Division 26 – Electrical?
Lighting control for addressable fixtures.
What is DALI?
A grid signal tells a building to pre-cool an hour early, then coast on thermal mass during the peak pricing window, and get paid for the flexibility.
What is a virtual power plant (also ok with grid-interactive efficient building / demand flexibility)?
An API answers how to access data. Haystack and Brick answer what question?
What is "what does the data mean?" (semantic context)
A campus shifts chiller setpoints and staggers EV charging start times between 2–6pm to stay under a demand threshold.
What is sustainability
Elevator destination dispatch
What is Division 14 – Conveying Equipment?
Telemetry for thousands of IoT sensors over constrained bandwidth.
What is MQTT?
An EV in the parking garage discharges stored battery power back into the building during a peak event, then recharges overnight.
What is vehicle-to-grid (V2G)?
A client wants to aggregate data from 500 buildings across multiple countries while minimizing operational overhead and enabling enterprise AI. Which deployment architecture is most appropriate?
What is a cloud-hosted (multi-tenant SaaS platform with edge gateways normalizing data at each site before centralizing it?)
An acoustic sensor array cross-references impulsive sound signatures against a muzzle-blast library and pushes a lockdown trigger to access control.
What is Safety (& Security)?
Fire detection and alarm system
What is Division 28 – Electronic Safety and Security?
HVAC, lighting, and metering systems from different manufacturers need to exchange data over one open, non-proprietary building network.
What is BACnet?
Instead of separate BAS, security, and IT teams each running their own point solution, one converged layer normalizes and governs data across all of them before any AI touches it.
This describes how software applications talk to each other; as opposed to the term for the rules governing communication between devices or systems.
What is an API (as distinct from a protocol)?
Luminaires shift correlated color temperature across the day to track solar time, while an air quality sensor throttles fresh-air intake based on outdoor PM2.5.
What is Wellness?
Building Automation System (BAS) controls
What is Division 25 - Integrated Automation? (23 is also acceptable)
An interoperable video analytics platform consuming cameras from multiple vendors.
What is ONVIF?
A city block runs its own solar-plus-storage network that can island itself from the main utility grid during an outage.
What is a microgrid?
Raw sensor readings become significantly more valuable when combined with this type of information that provides meaning and context.
What is metadata?
Janitorial routing skips a floor entirely because badge-swipe and Wi-Fi association counts stayed near zero all day.
What is operational efficiency?
Structured cabling
What is Division 27 – Communications?
DC fast charging stations communicating with a charging management platform.
What is OCPP?
Instead of one model answering one question, a coordinated set of specialized AI agents each own a subsystem, like HVAC, lighting, security, and negotiate trade-offs against each other in real time.
What is multi-agent orchestration (also agentic AI)?