Building optimization has gone from a niche pursuit to a core operational priority in just a few years. For owners and operators, every wasted kilowatt is money lost—but optimizing only makes sense when it reflects how people actually use a space. That’s where tech startup R-Zero sees a gap.
The company has launched its Room Intelligence system within its Connect platform, applying AI to building and occupancy data to turn raw numbers into actionable insights.
“Buildings are full of data. What’s [been] missing is a clear way to turn it into decisions teams can actually act on,” said R-Zero CEO Jennifer Nuckles in prepared remarks.
The system, she noted, aims to show how space usage directly ties into operations “so energy, ventilation, and space decisions can adjust dynamically in real time.”
This approach follows R-Zero’s earlier move into occupancy tracking. As GlobeSt.com reported, when the company unveiled its bidirectional counting at building entry and exit points in 2024, connecting occupancy and operations has become a critical step in managing performance and efficiency.
The company’s latest rollout goes further by feeding multiple data inputs into a room-level view, allowing operators to monitor how individual rooms, floors and zones are used over time.
“One of the straightforward examples is the ventilation of a building, based on occupancy,” R-Zero’s head of product, Alex Goodwin, tells GlobeSt.com.
“That’s tying together the occupancy sensors with the building’s management system to adjust in real time … which can help you determine what the savings are based on those changes. Similarly with lighting.”
“There are lots of ways to combine the data sets to really show where the opportunities are and then help people close the loop on them,” Goodwin adds. Beyond internal building data, such as air quality or temperature, the system can also pull in external inputs like weather information to refine performance decisions.
Equally important, Goodwin said, is “closing the loop around the building operations to help provide feedback to the building management system so that it can respond to the number of occupants to adjust things like HVAC settings or lighting or whatever the building chooses to do.”
Under the hood, R-Zero’s system uses multiple forms of artificial intelligence. A large language model lets users query the system in plain English, enabling “facilities managers or space planners who need to make business decisions” to quickly get targeted answers.
“We can give them information that they may not have had access to before to help make the case for a change or improvement, or to see what’s working, or can be or needs to be improved in their building operations,” said Goodwin.
Article was published on GlobeSt