Mark Gelfo, PE, CxA, LEED Fellow, EMP and Gary Haydu, CxA, TLC Engineering Solutions Discuss How AI Can Support Retro-commissioning in Retrofit Magazine
Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally reshaping how professionals diagnose, optimize, and future-proof existing commercial and institutional facilities. AI is not a threat to replace the human commissioning agent, design team, contractors or building operators; AI can be a valuable analytical assistant. Building professionals can leverage smart algorithms and AI tools to improve project schedules, elevate the depth of building diagnoses and deliver increased value to building owners. By integrating AI tools into workflow patterns, building professionals can reallocate their time toward high-level system optimization, life-cycle cost-benefit analyses and long-term operational improvement strategies.
Elevating the Human Professional from Validator to Consultant
In an existing building environment, where physical constraints are notoriously messy, human professional judgment and experience can NOT be replaced. AI tools help reduce or even eliminate administrative and repetitive manual tasks that historically consumed up to 50 percent of or more of their time.
An AI model can ingest a million rows of quantitative trend data and identify a statistical anomaly in milliseconds, but it cannot understand the qualitative context behind that anomaly. For example, AI does not know if a sensor was deliberately relocated by a facility manager to resolve a localized comfort complaint, if a legacy pneumatic control line is slowly leaking air behind a structural concrete column, or if a sensor is out of calibration and reporting inaccurate data. It lacks the contextual understanding and cannot perform boots-on-the-ground verification.
Integrating AI tools transforms the commissioning agent, design team and contractors from technical validators into strategic, whole-building performance consultants.
The future is not set. The long-term benefits of AI in the built environment depend entirely on our adaptability and our strategic choices, not on the underlying technology alone. By systematically utilizing AI to handle manual data extraction, we allow our project teams to apply deeper analysis, increasing the thoroughness of reviews and the quality of overall insights.
