Technician inspecting heating system with tablet. AI-enabled tools for managing building systems will replace non-AI-enabled tools, an HVAC industry executive says.

Dive Brief:

A major medical services provider achieved near-perfect internal temperature policy compliance, solved 78% of HVAC issues without a technician visit and cut its monthly energy costs by about 6.5% in a large-scale pilot of AI-enabled building controls, a Carrier sales representative said at a healthcare facilities conference.
Ed Carney, senior sales manager for Carrier’s Abound platform, said the more than 2,100-clinic pilot helped move the unnamed company — “you’d know them,” he said — from a reactive facilities management posture to a proactive one. At the same time, it underscored that “the most important part of AI is the human intervention factor … using it as a tool in the toolbox rather than an independent entity that does its own thing,” he said.
All 43 health systems that participated in a 2025 study led by researchers from Duke University, Rush University and other academic healthcare institutions reported using at least one AI tool in clinical settings, but Carney told the crowd at the ASHE 2026 Health Care Facilities Innovation Conference last month that he sees AI adoption lagging in healthcare facilities management.

Dive Insight:

Carney said the AI hype cycle is at a similar stage to the “Internet of things” boom of the early 2010s, when industrial firms, appliance makers and building systems providers raced to embed connected sensors in their products.

Now as then, the shift to AI-enabled building management is about doing more with systems and equipment, Carney said.

Carrier Abound’s client in the pilot, for example, was “gleaning as much juice as they could out of their [existing] building controls, and we thought there was a lot more opportunity,” he said.

Carrier says the Abound platform has saved clients over 7 billion kilowatt-hours of energy across more than 63,000 buildings covering upwards of 640 million square feet. Carney didn’t say how much energy its healthcare client saved in the pilot, which is ongoing, but the facility was “very satisfied” with the improved building management experience, he said.

Because the client’s previous building management system provided limited data about its HVAC system’s performance and energy usage, its maintenance posture had been reactive, characterized by post-failure responses rather than proactive prevention, Carney said.

The Carrier Abound solution integrates with BACnet-based open-protocol building automation systems in more than 25 equipment categories and can access and interpret more information from building HVAC and power systems than older, closed-protocol systems, Carney said. That enables the AI to use pattern recognition and historical data to predict equipment issues and then deliver plain-language recommendations to maintenance staff.

“Many of these building controls are legacy systems [that] are not operating on an open-protocol basis … and are frankly not future-proof,” Carney said. “They use proprietary closed protocols that will someday be gone because … if you can’t communicate to other software or other humans, it is of very low value.”

That’s not the only reason healthcare facilities should transition to open-protocol, AI-enabled building management solutions sooner rather than later, he said. Facility managers will have trouble pulling the insights needed to address rising energy costs and fuel-price volatility, staffing shortages driven by older technicians leaving the field, persistent workforce complaints about indoor comfort and cybersecurity challenges, among other things.

The goal is to use the AI-assisted platforms to be “much more predictive, much more thoughtful, much more anticipatory,” Carney said.

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AI-enabled building control pilot shows strong results for healthcare facilities: Carrier exec