Noda Launches Agentic AI for Commercial Building Operations

Noda, a leading artificial intelligence startup for commercial building operations, has launched what it calls the first agentic AI providing 24/7 automation to help ameliorate the industry-wide shortage of facility operators.

The Washington, D.C.-based company rebranded to its present form in 2023, with the goal of optimizing building operations by mapping data points, automating tasks and driving actionable insights, said Kate Henningsen, CEO of Noda.

“This technology was only about 32 percent accurate a year ago,” said Henningsen. “Although people are doing AI in buildings, we have not run across anybody who’s tackling the workflows of building engineers on site. I think it was probably impossible to do this over a year or 18 months ago, and we haven’t seen anybody who was aiding the actions of building operators and engineers in this way.”

That created a business opportunity.

“Every building in a portfolio is leaving net operating income (NOI) on the table right now, because no team has the capacity to find and fix operational waste at the speed and scale the problem demands,” said Henningsen. “Noda changes that equation. Our AI runs alongside the team you already have, doing the work of a full engineering organization across every asset, every hour of every day — and the impact shows up directly on the profit and loss statement.” 

Noda’s agentic AI platform creates a fundamental shift in how owners and operators run their buildings and portfolios, the company claims. Unlike analytics tools that surface problems for staff to investigate, Noda’s platform finds, fixes and verifies the problem and its financial impact across every asset, without requiring human intervention.

The company has a portfolio of 1,200 buildings, totaling 350 million square feet, based on Salesforce data, said Henningsen.

“We’re doing a lot of the building engineering and facilities management operations with new tools,” she said. “There’s great agentic ways to speed up a lot of what these facilities managers are doing with their mechanicals.”

Across its deployed portfolio, Noda claims to have eliminated 80 percent of manual workflows and cut the average time from issue identification to completed resolution by 40 percent. Project execution rates have doubled through its AI-driven prioritization, meaning a greater share of identified fixes are converted into realized financial impact. Customers are seeing 0.5 to 2 percent NOI growth with a 14x to 20x multiplier on those gains, verified against measured baselines and tied to individual assets, according to Noda self-reporting based on Salesforce data, Henningsen said.

“The size of the AI opportunity within real estate is another thread,” she added. “There is a $150 billion annual market for building operation expenses, with a potential labor crisis due to a 15 percent fill rate for AI-generated recommendations, meaning only 15 percent of these work recommendations are being filled by this labor force.

“This is not a story where AI takes jobs. This is a story where if people don’t adopt this largest asset class in the world, if it doesn’t have the people to run the buildings anymore, there’s a real cost and risk to that. So, this is a slightly different AI story than AI is here for everyone’s job. I mean, if you can only backfill 15 percent of your roles, there’s going to be a crisis.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.