Why the future of building standards runs on live data

I've spent a lot of this month in rooms full of people who care deeply about getting buildings right. I have had great conversations with Architects, consultants, sustainability directors, and even a Bureau Veritas assessor. But the same question kept coming up, from the audience and in quiet conversations after: how do we prove a building is performing, without burying everyone in paperwork to do it?

Standards matter. The process shouldn't crush them

The UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard was developed  with nine of the leading built environment organisations including CIBSE and UK Green Building Council. The work has been supported by over 300 expert volunteers working in a series of Task Groups and Sector Groups. That's not bureaucracy for its own sake, that's an industry working hard to agree what "good" actually looks like. I don't think we should lower that ambition for a second.

But right now, proving you meet it is painfully manual. I heard about a project this month where a client had asked for 25 buildings to be assessed. The process: send in a surveyor, run rough calculations against metered data, then commission full IES modelling. Three months. Around £100,000. And the output is a report, useful, but static, and loose enough that it's hard to act on with confidence.

Compare that with connecting straight into live data. The same assessment, done in days rather than months, at roughly 20 to 25% of the cost. And because it's live, it doesn't stop at a single report, it keeps learning and can be validated against how the building actually performs, not just how a model predicted it would.

This isn't about cutting consultants out. It's about freeing them up to do the part only people can do well: the judgement calls, the design decisions, the quality assurance. Less repetitive data capture, more value.

Take a look at our interactive demo to experience for yourself.

From static business cases to living ones

The second theme this month came from conversations with sustainability leads who have to sell all of this to their boards. Business cases in this space often take the better part of eight months to build, and the moment they're presented, they're frozen. If the board wants to change an assumption or explore a different scenario, that usually means going back to square one.

What we keep hearing is a real appetite for something more dynamic, investment plans that can flex in near real time, giving boards genuine agency to test scenarios rather than approve or reject a single fixed version. That shift, from static pitching to living, adjustable business cases, is one of the biggest unlocks we can offer.

Take a look at our interactive demo to experience for yourself.

Something new: taking this into manufacturing

We've just kicked off a project backed by Innovate UK that extends this thinking beyond buildings and into the equipment inside them. Rather than looking at a building or a manufacturing line in isolation, we're treating the whole asset as one connected system, using live data and edge computing to optimise across the lot.

It's early days, and we're starting with heavy-end manufacturing, but energy costs in that sector are punishing, and the potential to bring the same rigour and speed we've built for buildings into manufacturing is genuinely exciting.

More on all of this soon, including an introduction to a brilliant new addition to our AI team, Mahsa Mozhdehi.

As always IM me if you would like a conversation on any of the above.

Nick