The AI wave is not coming - it's already in your project schedule, your submittal review, and your predictive maintenance dashboard. The question is no longer “should we use AI?” but “which tools actually work, and how do I get my team using them by Monday?” Artificial intelligence has moved beyond simple chatbots and internet searches. Today's engineers, commissioning providers, contractors, and facility professionals are navigating a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI tools, agents, and connected workflows.
This practical session moves beyond software demonstrations to show how AI can improve project delivery, organize information, automate repetitive tasks, analyze technical documents and data, and support better decision-making. Walk through real-world examples in HVAC design and equipment selection, construction project management and commissioning, monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx), analytics, and facility operations. Attendees will learn how practical methods are used to develop scopes, review drawings and specifications, organize project records, verify requirements, automate checklists, analyze operational data, and generate project deliverables. The session also includes an interactive exercise to give the audience hands-on experience with AI, while emphasizing professional judgment, verification, and accountability — demonstrating how AI can accelerate work, uncover insights, and improve outcomes while reinforcing a simple principle: the value is not in the tool, but in the decision.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
• Recognize where current AI capabilities can create value across the building lifecycle, from design and construction through commissioning and facility operations.
• Improve project delivery by using AI to organize information, automate repetitive tasks, analyze technical documents and data, and support decision-making.
• Develop more effective prompts, workflows, and project structures for building projects by defining goals, qualifying information sources, managing project records, and generating more reliable outputs.
• Evaluate AI-generated results using verification, engineering judgment, industry standards, and professional accountability.
ASHRAE DL Category: Emerging Technologies; Smart Buildings and Smart Grids
Audience: Engineers, designers, contractors, owners, PMs, architects. Ideal for joint ASHRAE–AIA and Contractor sessions
Level: All Levels

Most commissioning presentations teach commissioning providers how to do commissioning, or are from the commissioning provider's perspective. This one is different. It is a playbook for everyone else at the table - the contractors installing, the engineers designing, and the owners funding the work - from someone who has sat in each of those chairs. Winning teams do commissioning well, and commissioning well done is a competitive advantage: fewer punch items, cleaner turnovers, better buildings, stronger reputations, and more repeat work.
This session flips the perspective. Drawing on experience as a designer, a contractor's commissioning leader, and an owner-side portfolio leader, it lays out what each role contributes to a strong outcome - and what each role gets in return. A straight-talk, field-ready playbook covers what "commissioning-ready" looks like at the time of award and in preparation for each phase of rough-in, start-up, and turnover; how to coordinate so that commissioning becomes an advantage for your party, too; how to protect scope and schedule when findings hit late; how to price commissioning-heavy work with confidence; and how each role can turn commissioning from a checkbox exercise into a shared advantage on the next project or bid. Content can be tailored for contractor audiences (field execution, startup, testing, closeout, profitability), engineer audiences (design intent, coordination, verification), or owner audiences (contracting, risk reduction, operational performance, long-term value).
Attendees leave with practical templates and frameworks - pre-functional prep work, functional test assistance, issue-resolution approaches, and a bidding framework that lets contractors and owners price and incorporate commissioning-heavy jobs with confidence. Coordinated, not an added layer. Practical. Field-tested. Team-built.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
• Recognize commissioning as a shared competitive advantage that elevates projects, teams, and reputations across contractors, engineers, and owners.
• Reduce project risk, rework, and cost overruns by planning commissioning collaboratively from the start.
• Apply practical approaches for startup, testing, turnover, and coordination that field teams can apply directly.
• Strengthen the team-based playbook that separates winning projects from the rest.
ASHRAE DL Category: Commissioning and Quality Control
Audience: Contractors, engineers, commissioning providers, and owners. Content tailorable for contractor-focused, engineer-focused, owner-focused, or mixed audiences
Level: All Levels

Every generation of building professionals is handed a challenge without a manual. Ours is delivering first-of-kind projects amidst AI-driven change, workforce shortages, accelerating schedules, and expectations that continue to outpace traditional playbooks. So how do you build the team, the division, or the venture that solves something no one has done before?
Drawing on a career spent launching firms, building divisions, and most recently creating the global team that delivered the world's first AI “super-factory” data center campuses, this presentation explores the practical leadership principles behind building something from nothing. Attendees will learn how to hire for ambiguity, create alignment when teams span multiple organizations and shifts, establish new operating rhythms when traditional project structures no longer work, maintain safety and quality under extreme schedules, and develop future leaders capable of carrying the work forward.

Through lessons learned from startups, existing-building programs, and world-first megaprojects, participants will gain practical tools for leading through uncertainty, building trust across diverse stakeholders, scaling teams responsibly, and creating cultures that thrive when there is no proven roadmap. This session is for anyone being asked to build a team, launch an initiative, or deliver outcomes beyond what their job description prepared them for.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
• Recognize the leadership challenges common to first-of-kind projects, initiatives, and organizational transformations.
• Build teams that can operate effectively in ambiguity, rapid growth, and changing conditions.
• Create practical frameworks for communication, decision-making, staffing, and execution when established playbooks no longer apply.
• Develop future leaders and cultures that sustain performance long after the first milestone is achieved.
ASHRAE DL Category: Leadership and Professional Development
Audience: Mixed technical + non-technical. Ideal for CRC keynotes, joint ASHRAE–AIA, ASHRAE-Owners, ASHRAE–Contractors, awards banquets, and Student/YEA capstone events
Level: All Levels

Interested in breaking into existing building commissioning and improving the buildings we already have? Existing buildings need more attention now than ever, and with ninety percent of the buildings that will exist in 2050 already standing, they may represent the single greatest opportunity in our industry. Yet the perceived complexity, uncertainty, and scope creep of existing building commissioning keep too many good practitioners on the sidelines.
This session tackles practical realities, covering how to scope projects in operational facilities when you do not yet know where testing will lead, how to plan and manage effort when troubleshooting can feel infinite, and how to align the team so both owner and provider succeed in implementing improvements. Drawn from a career of retro-commissioning at scale - including hospitality, healthcare, higher education, and industrial portfolios - the session shares workflows, templates, decision frameworks, and hard-earned lessons that make existing building work approachable, repeatable, and rewarding.
This is a how-to, and a call to action. Existing building commissioning is the essential first step toward decarbonization, energy savings, resilience, IEQ, and operating optimization - the foundation that makes every subsequent investment work. Standard 230 provides the framework to identify what is actually broken, misapplied, or mis-operated rather than defaulting to blanket repairs or untested guesswork. It also establishes the clean, verified baseline that analytics and monitoring-based commissioning platforms need to deliver real value rather than false alarms.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
• Structure scopes and agreements that protect both owner and provider when the full extent of work is not yet known.
• Use retro-commissioning as a focused diagnostic step that targets what requires improvement, and creates the verified baseline that operations, maintenance, and future capital investments depend on.
• Recognize commissioning of existing facilities as the essential first step toward decarbonization, energy savings, resilience, IEQ improvements, and operating optimization.
• Apply ASHRAE Standard 230 to scope, plan, and deliver retro-commissioning projects across a variety of building types.
ASHRAE DL Category: Commissioning and Quality Control; ASHRAE Standards & Guidelines; Decarbonization and Net Zero; Energy Efficiency and Sustainability
Audience: Engineers, contractors, facility owners, commissioning providers, emerging professionals, YEA, and practitioners pivoting into RCx/EBCx. Ideal for joint ASHRAE–Contractor, ASHRAE–Owner, and chapter mixed audiences
Level: Intermediate

Over the last few years, our industry has delivered the first world-first AI data center campuses to bring systems and servers online at a scale never previously attempted. From the owner's side of the table, as part of a global reliability engineering organization, the challenge was not whether individual components could work. It was whether an assembled system, larger than anything previously tested - including what could ever be replicated in a factory - could be commissioned, verified, and released to production on the timelines these projects demanded.
This session shares lessons from those first successful builds. Standard assumptions about sequencing and schedule no longer applied. We examine the realities of commissioning at true first-of-kind scale: equipment configurations too large for factory acceptance testing, accelerated construction timelines that overlapped trades and compressed the window for reliability testing and start-up, and sheer quantities of identical systems that could not all be tested within the construction schedule. We will discuss how teams managed balancing, controls calibration, and sequence validation across multiple shifts while construction continued around them, and how testing priorities had to be re-evaluated daily as schedules shifted, servers were staged, and load banks were released to make room for real IT load.
More than a technical review, this is a look at how cross-functional teams - owners, reliability engineers, designers, contractors, controls providers, and commissioning agents - developed new frameworks together to bring these facilities online safely and reliably. The session does not offer a prescriptive solution. It presents the specific challenges, decisions, and frameworks that evolved (and still are evolving) from the earliest attempts to where the projects ended up, and the lessons applied to successive sites.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
• Anticipate the coordination, scheduling, and technical demands of commissioning at unprecedented scale.
• Develop sound and reliable testing strategies when the industry playbook does not yet exist.
• Coordinate owner team, engineers, designers, contractors, controls providers, and commissioning agents across multiple shifts, trades, and disciplines under compressed schedules.
• Maintain commissioning integrity and quality assurance from concept through release to production, applying lessons forward from one site to the next.
ASHRAE DL Category: Commissioning and Quality Control; Emerging Technologies

Sub-Category: Data Centers
Audience: Commissioning professionals, mechanical engineers, PMs, owners of hyperscale and mission-critical facilities
Level: Intermediate

 

Across the industry, our best technical people are being handed management roles almost overnight. A senior mechanical designer becomes an engineering manager or principal. A commissioning specialist or technician becomes a project manager. It happens because they are technically excellent, and because the work will not wait. In high-speed, high-need verticals like data centers, mission critical, healthcare, and others, we do not have the luxury of a slow leadership pipeline.
The challenge is that some of these transitions go smoothly, and some do not. When they struggle, it is often not because of the person, but because the promotion happened faster than the preparation. Individual contributors become people managers. Skills like scheduling, contracting, resource loading, expense reporting, financial literacy, hiring and firing, performance management, conflict resolution, delegation, and communicating up and out to owners and executives are rarely built into a technical career path — and yet they are required from day one in the new role.

This session offers a practical playbook for both sides of that transition. For leaders and firm owners: how to identify readiness (and unreadiness), specific skills to build before the promotion happens, how to design a real management-readiness track, and how to strengthen the team a new manager leaves behind. For the rising professional: what a management role requires, specific skills that can be built at every career stage, and the honest question of whether people management is the right next step at all.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
• Recognize the skill gaps that can arise when technical specialists are promoted into management roles without prior preparation.
• Design a management-readiness pathway that equips technical staff with scheduling, contracting, financial, and people-leadership skills before promotion, not after.
• Support successful transitions from specialist to manager while protecting team performance, project delivery, and staff morale.
Prepare individually as a technical professional to build the leadership and business skills required for the next role, whether that role is people management, technical leadership, or both.
ASHRAE DL Category: Leadership and Professional Development; Ethics / DEI
Audience: Firm leaders, principals, project executives, engineering and commissioning managers, HR and talent leaders, rising technical professionals, YEA. Ideal for joint ASHRAE–AIA–Contractor leadership tracks, chapter leadership nights, and CRC workshops
Level: All Levels