Honeywell's building AI cut 90% of nuisance alarms in a pilot

Honeywell Technologies launched Forge Cognition on October 14, an AI system that sits on top of the controls a building already has and tries to do what a good operator does: sort real alarms from noise, spot equipment that is about to fail, and find energy waste. It was built with NVIDIA and Dell, and it has been piloted at NVIDIA's own headquarters.

It is not a robot with wheels. It is the same idea pointed at the HVAC plant and the alarm panel, and it is aimed squarely at the people who run buildings.

The numbers

The headline result comes from NVIDIA's Voyager building in Santa Clara. Honeywell reports:

• Up to a 90% average reduction in unnecessary alerts
• Up to 10% potential reduction in energy and utility use
• A comfort score above 95%, a weighted average of temperature, humidity and CO2 across zones

Read those carefully. The 90% is "up to" and an average. The 10% is a potential, not a saving on a bill. Fortune, which interviewed Honeywell's CTO, reported that the energy figure has been identified but not yet achieved.

Fortune also put some size on the pilot. Voyager is about 750,000 sq ft with about 900 pieces of tracked equipment. The team set a 90-day target in January and tracked 5 performance goals weekly. Before the project, an estimated 90% to 95% of security and access control alarms there were false, and 8 to 9 staff per shift were clearing them.

That last number is the one most facilities managers will recognize. Nobody budgets for alarm fatigue, and everybody pays for it.

Other pilots named in the release are a Fairmont hotel in Dubai, the NEX mall in Singapore, Vanderbilt University and Honeywell's own campuses in Bangalore and Richardson, Texas. Honeywell's Forge product page describes the Vanderbilt work as connecting more than 100 campus buildings, over 8 million sq ft, into one interface. Honeywell says its installed base is more than 300,000 sites. It has not said how many will get this.

Autonomy is switched off

The system has 3 modes: manual, semi-autonomous and autonomous. Operators set the level and can override it at any time. According to Fortune, CTO Suresh Venkatarayalu said the autonomous mode has not been turned on and may stay off for 2 to 3 years. His bar for letting it act alone was 10 out of 10 accuracy.

That is the right instinct, and it should set expectations. For the next few years this is a tool that tells your operator what it thinks and why. A person still decides whether to roll a truck or reset an air handler.

No price was published. Customers can engage Honeywell now to scope a deployment, and there is no general availability date. Fortune reported 12 more test sites across 12 industries over the next 6 months.

What this means for a building in Utah

Most Utah facilities will not see this soon. A school district, a mid-size office park or a car dealership is not NVIDIA's headquarters, and the release names no small-building package.

The problem it targets is universal, though, and you can work on it without new software. Pull a month of alarm history from your building automation system and count how many alarms got acknowledged without anyone going to look. If that share is high, your team has already learned to ignore the panel, and that is a risk long before it is an efficiency question. A Wasatch Front winter is a bad time to discover that the one real low-temperature alarm on a heating loop got cleared with the 40 nuisance ones.

The comfort and energy claims point at a second habit worth checking. Fortune's report mentions heating zones set near 58 degrees year-round at the pilot site. Setpoints and schedules that nobody has looked at since the last tenant moved out are common, and your own team or your controls vendor can audit them without buying a new platform.

There is a robotics angle here too. Buildings are slowly getting a layer of software that knows where things are and what state they are in. Floor robots, delivery robots and security robots all work better in a building that can tell them a door is held, an elevator is out or a zone is closed. Today most of them work around the building rather than with it. Systems like this one are where that starts to change.

What to watch

Watch whether Honeywell publishes a measured energy saving from Voyager rather than a potential one, and whether any of the 12 new test sites is a school, a hospital or a mid-size office. Watch for pricing, because a platform that needs on-site NVIDIA hardware and Dell servers will tell you quickly who it is for. And watch the autonomy switch. When Honeywell says a customer has turned it on, that is the real launch.