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KP Unpacked
KP Unpacked explores the biggest ideas in AEC, AI, and innovation—unpacking the trends, technology, discussions, and strategies shaping the built environment and beyond.
KP Unpacked
AI, Data Centers & The Energy Crisis—What Comes Next?
In this episode of KP Unpacked, host Jeff Echols sits down with Robert Cooper (CEO of Imbue) and Abhi Sastri (CEO of Fluix) to break down one of the most pressing challenges facing the built environment: How do we meet the surging energy demands of data centers, buildings, and critical infrastructure before nuclear and hydrogen power are viable?
Based on KP Reddy’s Sunday Scaries post, they explore:
🔹 Why energy infrastructure can’t keep up with demand—and what that means for AEC
🔹 How smart buildings, virtual power plants (VPPs), and energy optimization are filling the gap
🔹 The hidden inefficiencies in data centers & commercial buildings—and how AI can solve them
🔹 How technology at the grid’s edge is turning energy pain points into profit centers
🔹 What design and construction professionals need to know to stay ahead
From automation in data centers to the role of AI in energy efficiency, this conversation unpacks the critical innovations shaping the future of power consumption, energy management, and the built environment.
If you're in AEC, real estate, or tech, this is a must-listen—because the energy crisis isn’t coming, it’s already here.
🎉 Special Offer for KP Unpacked Listeners: Get 55% off your ticket to the 9th Annual AEC Summit on October 29th at the Diverge Innovation Center in Phoenix! Click the link below and use promo code UNPACKED55 at checkout.
Don't miss this opportunity to connect with top minds in AEC and beyond. Tickets are limited—act fast!
Hey, welcome back to KP Unpacked. If you've never been here before, welcome. I'm glad you're here. This is my opportunity, my weekly opportunity, to sit down with KP Ready and other guests to look at some of the things that KP Ready posts on LinkedIn and say, hey, what were you thinking? What inspired you to post that? Or if I'm with a guest, like I am today with two guests, as you can see on the screen if you're watching the video version of this I'm going to ask these guests what they think about what KP posts on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Now, if you're not following KP Ready on LinkedIn, you should be. Just go to KP the letters K and P and then ready R-E-D-D-Y. You'll find him there. Just follow him. He is traditionally pretty much filled up on his connections count, so you won't be able to connect with him probably, but you can follow him. Kp posts once, twice, maybe three times every day about his insights, the things he's seeing, the things he's hearing, the things he's learning, the things he's working on that have to do with the built environment. Maybe it's investing, maybe it's startups, maybe it's operations in the realm of architecture or engineering, construction materials, owning, operating, managing anything within our built environment.
Speaker 1:And I'm joined by a couple of guests today that I'm really excited about. I know both of these guys, had great opportunities to talk to both of these guys in the past, and they are the two guys that need to be with me to unpack this post from KP as we're recording it. He posted it about three weeks ago. That's what it takes sometimes to work out the logistics, to get everybody in the same room at the same time, so to speak, but it's a great post. We're going to have a great conversation about this topic.
Speaker 1:So I'm happy to introduce to you Robert Cooper he's the CEO of Imbue and Avi Sastry. He's the CEO of Fluix. Great couple of guys very, very knowledgeable in what they do and where they've been, and so we're going to have a lot of fun unpacking this post today. So let me start with Robert. Robert, again, thanks for joining me today. Why don't you let all of our listeners and all of our viewers know who you are, what's your background, what's in view, and all of our viewers know who you are, what's your background, what's Imbue and where are you approaching this?
Speaker 2:particular post from Sure thing.
Speaker 2:So I'm really excited to be on this show with Jeff and Avi and thanks a lot for putting it all together.
Speaker 2:So Imbue is a smart building platform that's solving some of the biggest pain points in real estate, and those include a lot of day-to-day problems like water leaks and frozen pipes and energy waste. But I think what's super exciting is that we're also solving some of the biggest problems and pain points that are coming down the track towards real estate, and those are all about energy, how much it costs, how hard it is going to be to get a hold of it and how the cost of energy is actually going to vary depending on what's going on in the environment, what's going on in the grid and what's going on in terms of your own usage and your own load profile. So really, the idea is to just make these buildings smarter and more profitable, and we're going to get into that whole energy conundrum that's coming along, and I think people will realize that with a solution like we've got, you're going to be on the right side of some of these pain points. They're actually going to be profit centers for you that were starting off as pain points.
Speaker 1:Love that it starts off as a pain point ends up as a profit center. That's important, especially in this realm that we're going to talk about today energy and usage of resources. So, thank you, robert. Again, thanks for joining us today. Avi, you're the CEO of Fluix. How'd you get there and what's your approach to this article that we're going to talk about today?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks. So at Fluix we run data centers on autopilot. We kind of call ourselves the Google Nest meets Waymo for data centers. So Google Nest, you're changing temperature on your AC at home, you're getting analytics. We do that with data centers. Waymo autonomous driving cars we run your data center on autopilot.
Speaker 3:The way I got here at age 21, I invented a new liquid cooling solution. I was absolutely obsessed with how to cool down computers. I was an aerospace engineer by training, so we did a lot of fluid dynamics, heat transfer stuff and that got me into a lot of data centers and server manufacturing rooms. And that got me into a lot of data centers and server manufacturing rooms and my obsession quickly went from how to optimize a server to have peak efficiency, peak performance, to every facility team I met. These guys needed help. Right, they would wake up at 3am, go to the data center site, keep all of this infrastructure running and everything from video calls to text message to emails runs on data centers. They get no recognition.
Speaker 3:But data centers are some of the most complex buildings and they're kind of playing whack-a-mole. Right, you might have an AC unit. Go down on the fourth floor that you have to run over there you might have. You know, temperature sensors, alarms come out, so I was able to understand them, not just through my first startup, but later I got to work with the Department of Defense and some of the data centers in the industry as a systems engineer, so I was able to cut my teeth in facility management. How I see KP's post and I know we're going to get into it. But you know obviously want to hear from Robert as well too. But I want to bring in the angle of you know, as we wait for nuclear, as we wait for hydrogen power, data centers and some of the other stuff, there's a level of intelligence needed. Today. Demand's not stopping, so we're hoping that maybe we can make a small dent in that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and you know those analogies that you use as a visual seeing guy. Now my mind's running wild. We've got Whack-A-Mmole, we've got waymo, we've got google nest. I may get lost in this conversation pretty quickly. We'll see how it goes. Oh, obby, thank you for uh for being here. Appreciate both of you. Uh, the post that we're talking about, the posts I keep referring to um again, kpady on linkedin, he posted this on about uh, if you're listening to this sometime in the future, you need to dial it back to maybe about february 3rd or so. Uh, 2025, if you're listening, in 2030 or something like that. Just go back a few years. It it goes something like this During the early 90s I started an ISB Internet Service Provider.
Speaker 1:We used the T1, which is one and a half megabyte on the back end in a 28.8K modem on the client-facing side. As we grew, we added capacity on the back end and slowly upgraded the front end to 56K. We grew like crazy, ended up opening up a co-location facility, etc. The demand was unreal. Big companies were laying fiber etc. The time to build out capital infrastructure couldn't move fast enough to keep up with the demand. The dot bomb, as he calls it, paused the demand. For a little bit, there were a few workarounds that the industry developed. Even as client-facing bandwidth increased, the back end was highly limiting, think DSL, cable modems, et cetera. What were these workarounds? Content caching, think Akami. I may be mispronouncing that.
Speaker 2:Akamai.
Speaker 1:Akamai, thank you. Private peering, neutral and others. Reduce the hops Similarly until we can build energy infrastructure like nuclear. There are some workarounds Energy optimization many building systems, data centers, et cetera do not optimize because when they were designed and built, power was abundant and cheap. Take a look at companies like Fluixai and talk to Abhi VPP, virtual power plant, think private peering, but for electrons, not bits.
Speaker 1:Talk to our port co imbue, which is, which is Robert, so KP's laying the groundwork there, and you both touched on this, you know, in your introductions as you started getting started or as we started getting getting going here, one of the things that I've heard, so my, my background is architecture, I hear, I have my ear to the ground on design and construction, things like that, and I'm hearing all kinds of stories. I'm based in Indianapolis, you know, in the Midwest, and I hear stories about people wanting to build data centers or other types of industrial facilities out in you know what's effectively cornfields or soybean fields at this point, cornfields or soybean fields at this point, and the energy draw on their facilities, you know when they submit for permits, is greater than the entire County, you know, as it currently exists. So we, we, you know, just simple examples like that, whether it's a data center or anything else, like hey, wait a minute, this is great. We're talking about efficiency. We're talking about about these different ways maybe more environmentally friendly ways, maybe not, but these advancements in technology et cetera, but we don't have the infrastructure, and I'm pretty sure it's not just in the middle of Indiana that that type of thing is happening.
Speaker 1:So, as the two of you are looking out both from your product and also your customer point of view, ap mentioned several things in here. He referenced both of you. What do we need to be paying attention to in terms of these workarounds? How are we getting there to keep everything moving forward? Anybody want to volunteer to kick this off to?
Speaker 2:keep everything moving forward. Anybody want to volunteer to kick this off? Yeah, I think I would just add that just to reinforce what the problem is right. So you need more power, and then you need to get the power from where it's produced to where it's consumed, and that involves building transmission lines, which people know what those are. They're big pylons, but people also don't recognize that. The distribution grid, which is the wires on the street. They're on poles, they're under the ground, there's substations. You kind of don't notice them unless one of them blows up or something. All of that stuff is also wicked expensive and wicked hard to build. And so the issue is yeah, you're going to build new power generation, but you're also going to build all those wires, and the combination of that is just a massive effort and it's fairly slow moving, to say the least.
Speaker 3:So that is really a good setup for the problem and what some of the workarounds can be such a good point and and, robert, you hit it on the nail because it's you know, I spoke to a data center operator where he was building 20 megawatt data centers in the early mid 2000s, right, and he said 20 megawatt sites, who's going to use all this power? Notice, today that's such a mini site. You could have a few racks use that much power. And the problem is, I guess, being an analogy person, it's kind of like you ever see you buy a new car and you see the infotainment system. They have all these nice screens. Take a look at that car five years later and those screens look outdated. It's a big problem if you're an automotive.
Speaker 3:Think about data center, everything that Robert just said. Okay, this data center is going to use 300 megawatts of power. I need a 300 megawatt substation. I'm probably going to get a 600 megawatt substation. The problem is, nvidia comes out with a GPU that uses 400 watts in 2021. And in 2023, two years later, they come out with a GPU that uses 800 watts and then, not two years later, but 12 months later, they come out with a GPU that uses 1600 watts. So that's at the minuscule scale. These semiconductor companies are finding out ways to pack more power in these GPUs and brute force method. And then, if you take the problem down the line, if you're building a substation for 600 megawatts today, thinking that'll be enough for the next 20 years, it might not be. So, to Robert's point, it's a big problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what's interesting is, you know, we all have got used to computing power becoming more powerful for less watts. And so why is it suddenly more powerful for more watts? It's because the computing, the efficiency, is still improving on those chips, but the parallelism and the processing power is going up by orders of magnitude. It's just an amazing thing, but that's why electricity growth has to grow, even though Moore's law is still in effect and these chips are getting faster and using less power for each little piece of computing. But I think the I also reasoned by analogy, and it's why I really liked kp's post, and it's like you know, the analogy with the growth of the internet is so, so true, right, and we saw that, um, you know, the big pipes on the internet were not growing at the speed they needed to be. Um, so people were doing workarounds on the edge, and I'm not even sure I'd call them workarounds, right, there's a lot of innovation you can do at the edge, so you can, and you can do it faster there than you can do in the grid. You know, the grid is highly regulated, much more regulated than the internet was. Of course, the phone industry was highly integrated, and I think that's an interesting analogy. But it's highly regulated, it's slow-moving, huge capital expenditures needed.
Speaker 2:The edge is good because that's where people use the power, it's where they can generate the power, it's where they have profit and loss statement for their company. They can do things that make money. They can do things that make money. They can do things that save money and they can do them relatively quickly. And the good news is that every one of those people at the edge of the grid has a meter and they have an electric bill, and that is the mechanism by which they're able to see how much they're using, see how they get in charge, see how they get in charge, see how they get in charge, maybe at different times of the day. That's where they can sign up, if they're sophisticated enough. Sign up for a program that will pay them to reduce their electricity load at certain times of the day or certain times of the year, or pay them to put money into a battery or take money out.
Speaker 2:Take it is money. Take energy into a battery or, you know, release energy out of a battery and get paid to do that. The complicated thing is, as anybody knows that's looked at their electricity bill, it's not very transparent and it requires a lot of expertise. And that's your monthly bill. Now, imagine you're doing stuff in real time, right? So there's this opportunity to make money and save money by the time. You know around how you use energy and when you use energy. But you know, all these people on the edge of the grid don't want to become energy day traders, right?
Speaker 1:Somebody's got to do it automatically for them, but we know how to do that so does that open up, then, a whole new industry, or or is that industry already there? I mean, is it are, are the imbues and the fluixes of the world, or is that where you're working, and is there more room on the edges for that type of innovation that you're talking about?
Speaker 2:So what exists today is that very, very large electricity users and I'd like to hear from Avi if the hyperscalers presumably fit into that bucket but the ability to get paid for shaping your energy usage, if you are a very, very, very large user, has been around for a very long time. Somewhat shockingly, it's done by phone calls and emails telling people to reduce, you know, their energy usage, or it's true? It's absolutely true. And then, at the other end of the scale you've seen and you know NIST is an example of this right A single family residential program where they'll pay you.
Speaker 2:You know NIST is an example of this right. States that find it difficult, slash impossible, to make money from the grid tend to be enterprises that spend 99% of their time worrying about their core business and they don't have the time and resources to think about what could be very, very lucrative for them or that's something that could turn into a pain point for them around electricity rates. So that's really where we dig in, and from my conversation with Arby, I think there's a similar focus there, that this is a big market of folks that are gonna need a lot of help and automation to take advantage of this opportunity at the edge of the grid 100%.
Speaker 3:I think the verdict is still out there for certain types of assets. Like I could definitely see it, the problem with data center assets is downtime. It's difficult to curtail loads, but I think for a certain type of data center asset it could work so high they need to keep certain uptimes. But a certain type of edge case data center which is popping up right, we're seeing, you know, and not just data center assets, but, you know, people are finding out creative ways to deploy that type of asset using legacy facilities or even newer facilities. So people always talk about new builds, but existing builds can be utilized in a different way as well too. And I'm fascinated with, with what you were saying, robert, with you know, how can people utilize their energy footprint, you know, in a way where they can put some more money back into their pocket? I'm still trying to figure out, you know, speaking to customers every day on how that can be done for data center, when uptime is there.
Speaker 3:Where we can see the opportunity is if they have automation and intelligence, maybe they can make that decision better, rather than playing the whack-a-mole analogy before, where they're trying to just keep their facility running heat loads, trying to optimize. Now, if they have intelligence, they can make decisions before something goes wrong. So they can't have intelligence, they can make decisions before something goes wrong. So they can't be reactive. They can be predictive. And once we get them to the predictive state, then we can start introducing incentives, as you're talking about. But the problem with data centers so mission critical, playing whack-a-mole, they're always reacting, maybe a day or two behind sometimes, you know, with more sophisticated data centers. But if we can get them to the predictive state, then that becomes really interesting. Right, and you know, the verdict is still out there, but I think I'm very optimistic.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like most of the discussion that we're having right now so far in this conversation is really on the uh, on the operation side, if that's, if that's fair um, which is an important perspective, and obviously that's what's going to drive a lot of this innovation. If you're on the on the other end, maybe, of the um the project timeline or the project lifeline, which I know a number number of our listeners are from the design and construction side of the equation, what are the things that I need to be learning or what are the things that I need to be specializing in to effectively compete in this marketplace as it evolves? If I'm an engineering firm or if I'm a construction firm, armed with this information that you're talking about, or this understanding that both of you are sharing here, what do I need to be saying to my clients?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, one of the things is it's like a moving hockey puck, right? So I'll give you an example right now liquid cooling. You know, I've been in my first company was in liquid cooling, right, and there were certain regulations that weren't there, or guidelines. Ashray just came out with a regulation or a guideline on liquid cooling. So liquid cooling is a new type of cooling solution, but people don't, you know, to robert's analogy beforehand, people don't think about the pipes, the manifolds, the valves, the, the redesign. You need to even install liquid cooling and cooling technologies, right? So keeping your eye on how new cooling techniques are being installed, how data centers are being redesigned there's a huge focus on modularity on that front as well, too, even though it's a moving hockey puck if you will not be discouraged as well, because again I keep using the word the verdict is still out there on what is going to take market share.
Speaker 3:As far as that, I would say, being part of the conversation in a certain type of way, there needs to be a better connection between those vendors, the designers and people that see end of life. I see a disconnect. For example, at Supercomputer the conference in Atlanta, a lot of people were very optimistic about liquid cooling, but all the vendors talking about these new cooling technologies. They're not really speaking, with some of the designers coming forward in the back end. I think the problem will surface once they start turning. Right now, they're super focused on turning legacy into new cooling designs, which that's the main focus.
Speaker 3:But how do we design a new building for this type of cooling design? Will this cooling design last for the next 20 years? If it does, can we build the modularity for a different type of cooling design? Um and and being part of the conversation and having conversations with the regulators on what we're seeing in real time? So, but I know that's that's a much bigger problem. If designers, building owners and regulators could all speak together in one, one way, that could be ah, I'm dreaming now, and that'd be really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I'd second that. That thinking about I mean obviously saying you've tried to future-proof your building is a little bit glib, because how are you going to pick the future right? But it's already obviously extremely complex to design buildings and if you look at any, you know BIM models of a building and and we look at them just to see you know where the small amount of networking equipment that we need is going to go right. But when you look at them, there's just pipes of all different kinds of infrastructure in these buildings. So you know thinking ahead, for for what Avi was talking about, you know, makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:It's going to.
Speaker 2:You know it's going to be challenging. I've seen this approach, though, taken in other domains. For instance, the city of Boston actually created a sort of zoning rule for certain kinds of projects, saying you need to make the building solar ready. And all that meant was, you know, think about the roof, because there's so many times somebody goes, put solar on the roof and you know, if they just rearrange things a little bit, you would have got like twice as much solar on the roof. And then make sure you've got the conduits to go from the roof down to where the switch gear is going to be and the inverters, and then allocate some space down there. And it turns out that wasn't a heavy lift and it just really really made it easy to put solar into a building later. And I find that sort of catalytic approach is really good, because maybe you can't afford solar right now, or maybe you want to wait until the panels get better, and so that's a really good approach.
Speaker 2:What I would say right now is batteries. Figure out you know where the battery could go in your building or outside your building and try to make that a priority Now. Again, future proofing is gonna be tricky because I think some of the fire regulations are still being worked out. There's still a lot of autonomy from the local fire chief, fire inspector, so stuff is not codified yet. But I think trying to do that is gonna really, really help your building from multiple dimensions. Of course, you're going to make money in the way I just described earlier, but you're also going to be able to make that building more resilient, warm and charge their cell phones, things like that. So it's just a really good idea to do that. And the more innovative so we do both going into existing buildings and going into new construction and the most innovative new construction folks are absolutely doing that.
Speaker 1:Well.
Speaker 1:I think, that was an important word that you just used that resilience right? I think that was an important word that you just used that resilience right. We, we. Right now I'm working part. Part of what I do at KP Ready Company is is run our mastermind program. We're getting ready to launch a new mastermind group that's going to be focused on sustainability or resilience, and and you know, we're talking about that in a different way perhaps than we are in this conversation, but it's, you know, in're talking about that in a different way perhaps than we are in this conversation, but it's, you know, in a way it's also related.
Speaker 1:That idea of resilience.
Speaker 1:You know, as I'm listening to the two of you talking, I'm thinking, okay, we're going to build more data centers, we're going to build more data centers, but we're, you know, the whole workaround is not ditching the old data centers, it's building the resilience in so that we can modify, renovate, whatever the proper term is there.
Speaker 1:I think that's super interesting. So, as we look towards the future and I think, avi, it was you you mentioned nuclear and hydrogen projects as power sources. Those don't appear to be happening this year as something that's going to start running all of our data centers. Is there any sort of prediction or projection about how long, what sort of timeline, or what are we looking at in terms of needing to iterate and iterate, and iterate, and iterate on how we continue to keep these data centers running and at the same time, as you mentioned earlier, you know we're designing new ones while we're retrofitting old ones, and the modularity I think is a is a important and intriguing concept as well. But what do we? What does the future look like, as we're trying to keep things going and becoming more efficient and still moving forward at the same time?
Speaker 3:well, one future is microgrid you nuclear reactors running your data center. Or, you know, quantum comes out and we're able to run quantum on current. You know quantum computers are not made for the current type of you know, applications that we're running. They're made for specific applications. The other is data centers under in the ocean. But you know people are not pretty happy about that too in certain cases. So this could go very different ways.
Speaker 3:Making a prediction and a hot take is difficult, but the one thing that I know is in the last seven weeks the floodgates have opened. People have heard about deep seek. People have heard about, you know, mit making large language models much faster using less money. And what it's done is it's opened up a paradox that people refer to called Javon's paradox, which is essentially, you know, back in you know, industrial revolution, a more efficient steam engine. People thought that if you create a more efficient steam engine you would use less coal. Well, the inverse happened. A more efficient steam engine accelerated the use of coal dramatically. You know the one time Javon's paradox proved to be wrong LED light bulbs. People thought, oh, led light bulbs, it's going to drive energy usage up. It actually made energy less. In the case, Javon's paradox breaks. When there's a limited amount of places, you can put the optimization, so there's a limit, but in AI there is no limit. So what I say?
Speaker 3:The floodgates have opened in the last six weeks. These models are becoming more efficient. People are finding new ways. There's going to be a lot of compute. You might not need the top silicone, so you might not need to go to taiwan and tsmc to find the best silicone. You might be able to find silicone in korea or or others. So you know we can talk about geopolitical stuff and how, how those countries are going to do, and that's always exciting, um.
Speaker 3:But what I'm really excited about is, you know, let's not forget about the data centers that run today. Yes, there will be nuclear, there will be hydrogen. How do we make that gap? So the one way we can do that is when I was trained as a controls or thermal engineer that workforce, you know they're saying that 50% of the workforce in the built environment is going to retire by 2030. I'm not sure if that's true or not. Please, that workforce that's about to retire, document everything. Leave for the younger guys something to read to refer back to. Mentor, your young engineer, right? I think that's the missing gap is the workforce and the labor as we try to come forward. But I know that's a deeper conversation. And, robert, lovely to hear your thoughts on this. You've obviously been in the industry as well too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we totally see that. I mean we, you know we go into these buildings and you know we're meeting with the site staff in the building as well as we're meeting with the C-suite, and it's it's always our mantra like, whoever we're seeing in the building, you whip out the phone and show them the MView app and show them what they could be doing at the building, and what you'll find is that, first of all, there are some aging, you know, post-retirement age, but they're still working there, maintenance folks in these buildings. By the way, rule number one is don't judge people by appearances. So early on, as in a boiler room guy there with the boiler suit on, he must have been pushing 80. And later I forgot something to ask him. So I emailed him afterwards and I get a reply back from him and it says sent by Galaxy, you know, on a Galaxy 9. I'm like, okay, he's going to really latch onto our product, and, it's true, there's a lot of folks of that vintage that are just overjoyed with this product.
Speaker 2:Flip side, though, is you got a lot, you know. You've got new folks, you know, moving into the industry, and they're just shocked at how manual a lot of the processes are in these, in these, in these buildings, right, and and, and it's a little bit of a traumatic for them because they have to walk around and look at things and walk around and look for things that are going to go bad, right, and we all know that's a terrible way to least inefficient way you can imagine to look for problems, right, but it's also sort of soul destroying for these, these employees. So when you give them the fun, they're like oh, finally, you know, I can see what's going on in my building and somebody else's building. You know one of my peers and the good news is that you know. Yes, you want to have the. You know the retiring, the aging out workforce. You know, explain things to people. But, honestly, we're getting so much data out of these buildings that pretty quickly, we know what's going on in that building and not a knock on the wonderful people that have been running these buildings by hand. But there's stuff you can't see, no matter how good you are, but you can see it instantly when you're pulling the amount of data we are out of the buildings from places you can't see.
Speaker 2:One of the phenomenon you get with our platform I'm sure you've seen it as well is, if you go into a building that hasn't had this kind of technology before and put it in on day one, our system is telling them about all kinds of problems in the building and there's this funny phenomenon where they blame the new guy. So they're like, oh, the Sanview system broke half our fan motors. It's like, no, they were already broken. But it's in the nature of buildings and the nature of people that a lot of stuff can be broken and you don't know about it. Actually, you do know about it. You know about it when a polar vortex comes through and then that fan motor that's broken, but it didn't matter because the apartments on either side were kind of warm. That doesn't work anymore. They're freezing. Now you have, you know, a whole boatload of, you know emergency calls at the worst time when you can't do anything about it. So I would say you're right. But there's also lots of stuff you can find out about the building that nobody knew until you put this kind of technology.
Speaker 2:So I think it's really I mean literally is a game changer for just running these buildings better. And where that gets into the whole sort of having to walk around the building waiting for things break, things break. People notice things only when it gets really cold or really hot out. We fix those problems kind of on day one. We're also future-proofing that building and that future might be tomorrow because they're putting a battery in, or it might be two years from now. We hope it's tomorrow because the more of that that happens, the more we're able to solve the grid problem, this gap in the grid, if you will. Before, Jeff, as you pointed out, you know, nuclear and enhanced geothermal and some of these other great technologies kick in, so that twofer of really solving the customer's problem where they are today, which then gives them the ability to solve those future problems. I think that's really powerful.
Speaker 1:Excuse me, I love that and I think you know Avi used to use the term a few minutes ago about excitement. What excites you so as we look out and and maybe it's now right maybe it's some of the things that that you're working on now, or you see now the possibilities that you see now, or maybe it's something you see on the horizon. But, robert, what's one thing that really excites you about the innovation?
Speaker 2:on the edges of what we, of what this technology can do. So you know, I've got a career in the tech industry and it's all been about, you know, bits and bytes and now atoms and so forth. Bits and bytes and now atoms and so forth. And until I started on Vue I didn't really realize what a people problem and a people solution some of this technology is. So obviously, you know, we do a lot of apartment buildings, multifamily. This is where people live, right, the staff. It's very human how people interact with the buildings and how they interact with our technology. And that's really what sort of gets me up every day is helping solve that. You know those staffing issues and those. You know there's other people issues in these buildings.
Speaker 1:And you know, ultimately, you know, the grid is about providing power to people, or providing power to AI. That's helping people and that like that. Right, we often get focused on the technology, on the innovation, you know, on the output and things like that, but ultimately this all does come back around to people issues. So, abhi, when you're looking out there maybe in your work, maybe it's in the work of others or something that you see in the future what excites you the most as we wrap up a conversation about this type of innovation?
Speaker 3:What excites me is helping facility people Facility managers, facility technicians, engineers some of them wake up at 3 am, go run the world. They get no recognition right. They're kind of in the background keeping all the things running and they need help. So when we set up tritium or niagara or you know nothing against those bms systems, but they take time it could take almost three months to hard code all the sensors onto one platform.
Speaker 3:What excites me is a future when ai could do that in a day and help them. Right, they could speak to the system, connect a sensor instead of running down and looking through documentation. A model can help them. So really making sure that technology augments their abilities. So now they're not playing whack-a-mole. Maybe there's one day where, if a hurricane's coming to your data center site, you don't have to leave your family in a hurricane to go and take care of the site, because the AI system is telling you hey, fuel pumps are okay, your backup generators are fine, stay with your family, take care of your kids. These people need help. So what excites me to Robert's point as well is helping these people that run the world. They need help, they need a little bit more recognition. So if you ever meet a facilities person say thanks, I guess. And yeah, I think the future is really bright.
Speaker 1:So yeah you know I love these conversations because it's and in you know the world where I get to work. We're often talking about innovation and you know, maybe it's startups, maybe it's SaaS software, maybe it's building materials, something else, but it always comes back around to that people. You know the people problem or the people issue or the impact on human beings, so I love the fact that we're not losing track of any of that. When your fan club of facilities managers out there, when they want to reach out to you, when they want to find you, what's the best way? Where do you want to point people to? Is it the Fluix website? Is it LinkedIn?
Speaker 3:What's the best way to connect with you and find out more about what you're doing? Oh, man, I still love the in-person aspect. But, yes, go to fluixai if you want to learn more about us. Fluixai. But I'm sure I'll see you guys at the conferences. I love meeting people in person. Um, linkedin's a great way as well too. Um, but yeah, hopefully I get to meet y'all at some of the great conferences coming up data center, you know, built environment conferences love to meet people in person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I love it. And and producer Ethan will, as he puts the show notes together, anything that Robert's talking about, anything that Avi's talking about, producer Ethan will put those links and things into the, into the show notes. So as you're listening and you say, oh, how did, how do you spell fluix? Just just go to the show notes and the link will be there. And producer Ethan is is developing articles from every single one of these episodes, from all of these conversations, so you can find those as well and find out more information about what we're talking about. Robert, what about you? What's the best way for somebody to get in contact with you and find out more about you and Mbu?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Just go to the Mbu website E-M-B-U-Ecom. You can also email me directly at robert at Mbucom.
Speaker 1:Love it. Robert Avi, thank you very much. This has been fun. This didn't get as controversial as I was kind of hoping, right?
Speaker 3:Oh, let's re-record that I got that.
Speaker 1:You want to stir the pot, we can keep going. Maybe that'll be the follow-up episode here, but I appreciate both of you coming on. I mean, this is this idea. You know, we I think we often get into this, uh, or I think it's easy to fall into the mindset of, oh well, this is, this is the new way to do it, or this is the way that we're going to do this in the future, or something, and maybe we maybe we look at it with blinders on a little bit and say, hey, you know, there's some workarounds, there's some, there's some renovations, there's some things that are going to have to happen with our existing infrastructure to bridge that gap. So I appreciate both of you coming on and and and joining me for this conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Robert. I learned a lot from you too, robert, so thank you, and Jeff, this was great. Sorry, I didn't want to cut you off, robert.
Speaker 2:Likewise Really learned a lot, Avi and Jeff. It was a very good session.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, thank you both. And for those of you that are out there, I mean, you know I get to talk with people like Robert and Avi and, you know, sometimes it's in this format, sometimes it's at our live events. We were talking before we hit record. Abhi and I saw each other in Miami at an executive briefing back in November, I think it was, and Robert and I I think maybe it was as far back as two years ago in Atlanta at our AEC Summit. But we have events coming up all the time where people like Robert and Avi and others that are thinking about innovation for the built environment, whatever that means. Right, there are specific areas of expertise and impact on the way things are designed and built and operated. Keep an eye out for things things that we've got going on as we're recording this, for things that we've got going on as we're recording this.
Speaker 1:I'm actually you can feel sorry for me. It's 17 degrees here in Indianapolis and I have to go to Phoenix next week for a one-day mastermind event. I know feel sorry for me, but we have those quarterly where we gather and talk about issues that are important to designing, building and operating in a built environment. We have our summit. We have executive briefings, so make sure that you're on the mailing list for our events and things like that, and you can find all that information through links in the show notes that producer Ethan is putting together as he's listening to this recording right now. So thank you all out there as you listen or watch these things. Thank you, robert and Avi, for joining me for this. Appreciate all of you for all of it.
Speaker 2:Thank you Thanks.
Speaker 1:Jeff, good to see everybody. Thank you, and we'll be back again next week with another episode of KPN Pact. Thanks everybody.