What does cutting edge feel like from the inside? Not the press release, it’s the paces and trials a team goes through when they're doing something nobody has done before. Data centers offer a good current example, but the pattern holds for any first-of-kind work: the schedule outruns the playbook, the reference project doesn't exist, and everyone's improvising in real time. Drawn from launching five firms and divisions, and building the global team behind the world's first AI "super-factory" campuses, this session covers what innovation demands of people: hiring for ambiguity, aligning teams across orgs and shifts, holding safety and quality when there's no precedent to lean on, and growing leaders who carry it forward. For anyone asked to deliver beyond what their job description prepared them for.

After attending this session, participants will be able to:

• Recognize the leadership and organizational strain that first-of-kind projects place on teams, using data centers and other innovation-driven work as examples.
• Understand what it takes to build teams that 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.

Category: Leadership & Professional Development · Audience: Mixed technical and non-technical — CRC keynotes, awards banquets, Student/YEA events · Level: All

Most commissioning talks teach commissioning providers. This one's for everyone else at the table: the contractors installing, the engineers designing, the owners funding  from someone who's sat in all three chairs. Fewer punch items, cleaner turnovers, stronger reputations, more repeat work. What "commissioning-ready" looks like at award, rough-in, start-up, and turnover; how to protect scope when findings land late; how to price Cx-heavy work with confidence. Field-tested, not theoretical.

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 use directly.
• Price and bid commissioning-heavy work with confidence, protecting scope and schedule when findings land late.

Category: Commissioning & Quality Control · Audience: Contractors, engineers, Cx providers, owners — content tailorable by audience · Level: All

Our best technical people are handed management roles almost overnight because they're excellent, and because the work won't wait. When those transitions struggle, it's rarely the person. The promotion just outran the preparation. Scheduling, contracting, resource loading, financial literacy, hiring and firing, conflict resolution, communicating up to owners and executives - none of it lives on a technical career path, and all of it is required on day one. A playbook for both sides: how firms build real readiness tracks, and how rising professionals decide if management is even the right move.

After attending this session, participants will be able to:

• Recognize the skill gaps that arise when technical specialists are promoted into management without prior preparation.
• Design a management-readiness pathway that builds 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 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

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 examples in HVAC design, construction project management, commissioning, and facility operations. Attendees will learn how tool are used to develop scopes, review drawings and develop specifications, automate checklists, analyze operational data, and generate project deliverables. The session also includes an 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

Ninety percent of the buildings standing in 2050 are already here — so why isn't existing-building commissioning a primary business for more firms, and a routine line item for more owners? It can be hard to sell, hard to scope, and hard to price on both sides of the table. Providers don't know what they'll find and can't bound the effort. Owners know something is wrong but can't write a scope for a problem nobody has diagnosed yet, so they buy a study that sits on a shelf, or blanket repairs that fix the wrong thing.

This session speaks to both chairs. For providers: how to scope operational facilities when you don't know where testing will lead, how to structure agreements and price the work so you don't lose money finding problems, and how to build a repeatable delivery model instead of a string of one-offs. For owners and facility teams: how to define what you need, what to ask for, how to contract for discovery and implementation as separate but connected phases, and how to fund and sequence the fixes once the findings land. Standard 230 gives both sides the framework to find what's broken instead of guessing and the verified baseline that makes every downstream investment, from analytics to decarbonization, actually pay off.

After attending this session, participants will be able to:

• Identify why existing-building commissioning remains underserved, and where the opportunity sits for both providers and building owners.
• Structure scopes, agreements, and pricing that protect both owner and provider when the full extent of work is not yet known.
• Define and procure an EBCx project that targets real operational problems, including how to phase discovery, implementation, and verification.
• Apply ASHRAE Standard 230 to scope, plan, and deliver retro-commissioning — and to establish the verified baseline that operations, analytics, and capital planning depend on.

Category: Cx & QC; Standards & Guidelines; Decarbonization; Energy Efficiency · Audience: Firm leaders, engineers, contractors, facility owners and operators, Cx providers, YEA, practitioners pivoting into RCx/EBCx · Level: Intermediate 

The ribbon's been cut and the facility is online. Go live — and you're at Day 2 (or beyond). This session is written for both sides of the engagement: the consultants brought in to work on operating data centers, and the operations teams who hire them and live with the outcome.

Ten years is a long time in this industry. This talk walks from 2016 to today — what it took to consult on an existing data center a decade ago, what it takes now, and what changed in between. It's told from both chairs, including time on the owner side working alongside the operations team at a top-five tech company. Operations is not design. Operations is not construction. Different pressures, different vocabulary, different definition of "done" — and consultants who don't know that get shown the door.

We'll cover what to consider when testing and renovating any existing facility — scoping around occupancy, phasing, protecting what's already working — then push into what it actually takes in the most sensitive live environments on earth. The core question: how do you survey, check, and test a running data center with zero downtime, when redundancy isn't a simple A side and B side anymore? Verifying sequences and running dynamic testing when nothing can drop. Surveying systems you're not allowed to interrupt. Recommending improvements around production. And building the trust that gets a consultant access in the first place. For operations teams: how to scope the work, brief a consultant, and set the guardrails that keep your site safe. For consultants: what operators wish you'd ask before you show up.

After attending, participants will be able to:

• Plan survey, testing, and renovation activities in continuously operating facilities without risking live load or production.
• Interpret modern redundancy topologies that no longer reduce to simple A/B configurations, and adapt verification and dynamic testing strategy accordingly.
• Recognize how operational priorities differ from design and construction priorities, and align scope, communication, and expectations between owner and consultant.
• Apply a decade of lessons — from 2016-era existing data centers through current owner-side operations practice — to Day 2 engagements in any mission-critical environment.

• Category: Commissioning & Quality Control; Operations & Maintenance (Data Centers) · Audience: Facility managers, operations and reliability teams, mission-critical owners, and the consultants and Cx providers who serve them · 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