Building performance platforms, wellness standards, and connectivity solutions converge to transform commercial real estate
The commercial real estate sector faces a defining moment. Buildings account for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, positioning the industry as a critical lever for climate action while meeting growing demands for healthier, more human-centered workplaces. At the Environmental Sustainability & Climate Innovation Forum, three leaders working at different parts of this transformation share how their organizations are coming together to reimagine what buildings can achieve.
Kate Rube, SVP Commercial at International WELL Building Institute, Cecilia Hughes, Executive Communications Director at Cisco, and Sharon Chen, Head of Go-to-Market North America at Akila, each bring a different perspective to the conversation. Wellness standards, connectivity infrastructure, and building performance platforms. Together, they explore how buildings can be simultaneously smart, healthy, sustainable, and resilient.
Why This Matters Now
Real estate decarbonization carries urgency because of both the sector's emissions scale and its unique characteristics. Long asset lifecycles mean that operational decisions made today lock in energy consumption patterns for decades. Complex ownership structures and fragmented stakeholder relationships create coordination challenges that isolated efficiency improvements struggle to overcome.
Traditional compliance-driven approaches often fall short because building systems operate independently rather than as integrated systems. The opportunity lies in leveraging technologies that enable real-time optimization across entire portfolios while improving occupant experience. Environmental performance and human wellbeing can reinforce rather than compete with each other.
Understanding Integrated Building Performance
Smart buildings use connectivity and data analytics to optimize performance in real-time, adapting to changing conditions rather than following static schedules. Healthy buildings prioritize occupant wellbeing through air quality, lighting, acoustics, thermal comfort, and biophilic design. Sustainable buildings minimize environmental impact across energy, water, waste, and materials. Resilient buildings maintain functionality through disruptions including climate events, grid failures, and public health emergencies.
The WELL Building Standard addresses 10 concepts for human health spanning air, water, nourishment, light, movement, thermal comfort, sound, materials, mind, and community. These concepts recognize that building occupants experience environments holistically rather than as isolated systems. Poor air quality can undermine benefits from excellent lighting. Uncomfortable temperatures can distract from thoughtful acoustic design. Effective building performance requires integration across these dimensions.
Hughes emphasizes that this integration depends on robust connectivity infrastructure. The sensors, analytics, and automation that enable wellness monitoring and energy optimization require networks that connect systems and enable data flows. Without reliable, secure connectivity, building systems cannot communicate or share the data necessary for integrated performance.
Achieving this integration extends beyond technical systems to organizational structures, requiring platforms that connect building owners, facility managers, technology vendors, and occupants around shared data and objectives.
Connectivity as Core Building Infrastructure
Hughes addresses how Cisco's network infrastructure has become as essential to modern buildings as electrical and mechanical systems, though many building owners may not yet fully recognize this shift.
Buildings increasingly incorporate thousands of IoT sensors tracking occupancy, air quality, energy use, water consumption, and equipment performance. Networks must handle substantial data volumes while maintaining security and reliability. Network failures affect more than internet access. They can impact HVAC system optimization, security system functionality, and wellness monitoring capabilities.
Network architecture has evolved to become fundamental building infrastructure. Building performance across smart, healthy, sustainable, and resilient dimensions depends on connectivity functioning reliably. This includes internal building networks, remote monitoring capabilities, cloud-based platforms like Akila, and potential integration with broader smart city initiatives.
Cisco's solutions provide secure, scalable networks that enable building systems to function as integrated platforms rather than disconnected components. This foundation supports real-time data collection, wellness monitoring, energy optimization, and performance analytics.
Security represents an important consideration. Connected devices can create potential entry points for cyber threats. Building operators manage numerous endpoints including sensors, cameras, access control systems, and HVAC controllers. Enterprise-grade network security helps address these considerations.
Cisco addresses security through approaches including network segmentation, encrypted data transmission, and threat monitoring, supporting building resilience while enabling connectivity benefits.
Building Performance Platforms Leveraging Connectivity
With robust network infrastructure in place, platforms like Akila can leverage AI, IoT, and digital twins to transform building performance management at portfolio scale. Chen discusses how traditional approaches relying on reactive maintenance and manual optimization face challenges keeping pace with dynamic occupancy patterns, weather conditions, and grid demands.
Modern platforms analyze data to help predict equipment issues, optimize energy consumption, and adjust environments for comfort and sustainability goals. This capability depends on network infrastructure reliably delivering data.
Digital twins - virtual replicas of physical buildings - enable simulation of operational changes before implementation. Organizations can test HVAC modifications, evaluate renewable energy integration, or model emergency scenarios without disrupting actual operations. This proves valuable for portfolio owners managing diverse building types across multiple geographies.
Digital twins require synchronization between physical buildings and their virtual models. Sensors feed data to cloud platforms, which process information and can send optimization commands back to building systems. This data flow depends on the network reliability and bandwidth that connectivity infrastructure like Cisco's provides.
IoT sensors provide visibility into occupancy, air quality, energy consumption, water usage, and equipment performance. Buildings may not always operate as designed, and platforms can reveal actual performance patterns. This visibility enables interventions addressing identified issues, though it requires connectivity infrastructure that can handle data from diverse sensor types, integrate with existing building management systems, and scale as monitoring capabilities expand.
Cisco's Role in Enabling Wellness and Sustainability Monitoring
Hughes examines how Cisco's connectivity solutions enable the wellness monitoring and sustainability optimization that WELL standards measure and platforms like Akila can help optimize.
Continuous air quality monitoring represents an important WELL concept. This requires sensors throughout buildings transmitting data in real-time to systems that can trigger ventilation adjustments or alert facility managers to issues. This represents a connectivity requirement as much as a data analytics one. Similar principles apply to lighting optimization, occupancy sensing for energy efficiency, and water quality monitoring - WELL concepts that depend on connected sensors and automated building responses.
Cisco's network analytics can provide building performance insights that complement optimization platforms. Networks can reveal patterns in building usage including occupancy flows, peak usage times, and system stress points. This network-level information can improve optimization efforts and help evaluate whether wellness and sustainability investments deliver expected results.
For portfolio owners with buildings in multiple locations, Cisco's centralized network management enables consistent connectivity standards while accommodating site-specific requirements. Consistent measurement enables benchmarking and portfolio-wide optimization. Standardized network infrastructure across a portfolio supports the data consistency needed for these capabilities.
Occupant Demand Influencing Real Estate
The conversation addresses how building occupants increasingly influence demand for healthier, more sustainable spaces, affecting real estate development and investment strategies. Employees expect workplaces that demonstrate commitment to their health and wellbeing. Tenants evaluating office space consider sustainability credentials alongside traditional factors like location and cost.
Connectivity has become an expected capability that tenants use to evaluate buildings. Tenants expect reliable, secure connectivity not just for business operations but for building services they interact with daily. Apps for environmental preferences, touchless entry systems, and space booking platforms require robust network infrastructure. Buildings with limited network capabilities may face challenges delivering the connected experiences tenants expect.
This demand shift creates business cases for investments in building performance. Buildings with wellness certifications can command rent premiums and experience lower vacancy rates. Organizations competing for talent may use workplace quality as a differentiator, with building health features becoming recruitment and retention considerations.
The transformation extends to investor requirements. ESG criteria increasingly influence real estate investment decisions, with building performance data becoming part of due diligence. Properties demonstrating sustainability and health metrics may attract capital more easily than comparable buildings without such documentation.
Progress and Challenges with WELL Standards
Rube discusses which WELL Building Standard concepts see strong adoption and which present challenges. Air quality receives significant focus, particularly following the pandemic, with organizations investing in filtration upgrades, ventilation improvements, and continuous monitoring. Water quality also receives attention as concerns about contaminants drive demand for testing and filtration.
The discussion highlights how connectivity enables new approaches to wellness monitoring. Continuous air quality monitoring faced cost barriers when it required expensive standalone systems. IoT sensors now cost less, and network infrastructure can support numerous sensors. This makes continuous monitoring across portfolios more practical, affecting how organizations can address WELL standards.
Concepts like mind and community present greater adoption challenges. These attributes can be harder to quantify than air quality metrics, making business case development more challenging. Organizations may struggle to value biophilic design elements, meditation spaces, or community programming, despite research linking these features to productivity, retention, and satisfaction.
Material selection presents challenges, particularly in renovations. WELL requirements around material health and transparency require documentation that supply chains don't always provide, especially from smaller manufacturers that may lack resources for product testing or ingredient disclosure.
Progress involves developing better data linking wellness investments to business outcomes. As organizations track metrics like absenteeism, productivity, and retention across buildings with varying WELL features, patterns may emerge that demonstrate return on investment, helping building owners justify investments to stakeholders focused on financial performance.
Building Investments as Business Value Drivers
The panel explores how organizations view investments in integrated building performance as potential drivers of business value, enhanced resilience, and competitive advantage beyond compliance requirements.
Productivity gains represent a potential opportunity. Research suggests that optimized indoor environments can improve cognitive function significantly. For organizations where labor costs exceed facility costs, productivity improvements may justify building investments.
Resilience creates value by helping maintain operations through disruptions. The discussion emphasizes network resilience as an important but sometimes overlooked consideration. During power outages, extreme weather, or other crises, buildings with resilient network infrastructure can potentially maintain critical operations, coordinate emergency response, and keep occupants informed. Networks with backup power, redundant connections, and failover capabilities can help prevent disruptions.
Buildings with backup power, water storage, flexible systems, and resilient connectivity may continue functioning when grid failures or extreme weather affect other facilities, helping prevent revenue loss and protect business relationships.
Brand value and talent attraction provide benefits that can be harder to quantify. Organizations demonstrating commitment to sustainability and health may strengthen reputation with customers, investors, and potential employees.
Asset value can reflect building performance. Properties with sustainability credentials, health certifications, and modern connectivity infrastructure may command premiums and experience less depreciation. As climate risks become more prominent in real estate valuation, buildings demonstrating resilience may command higher prices.
Advancing Adoption Through Collaboration
The session examines how real estate owners, technology providers, and sustainability leaders can collaborate more effectively to accelerate adoption and achieve decarbonization and health outcomes at scale.
Standardized data protocols emerge as an opportunity. Buildings generate substantial data volumes, but proprietary systems and incompatible formats can prevent integration. Industry-wide standards enabling interoperability could unlock platform capabilities requiring unified data streams.
The discussion highlights how organizations like WELL, infrastructure providers like Cisco, and platform operators like Akila can advance standardization through coordinated requirements and open architecture approaches. Cisco's work on open protocols, industry-standard communications, and APIs enabling third-party integrations represents a collaborative approach. When building systems can communicate across vendors, it enables portfolio-wide optimization, data sharing for benchmarking, and innovation unconstrained by proprietary systems.
Risk-sharing models can facilitate adoption of innovations. Structures distributing risk and reward among stakeholders - such as performance contracts where compensation ties to achieved outcomes - may enable faster innovation cycles.
Education and knowledge transfer can accelerate adoption by building internal capability. Real estate organizations need staff who understand both building science and technology infrastructure. Network infrastructure encompasses reliability, security, scalability, and the architecture enabling other smart building investments. Training programs, reference architectures, and best practices can help real estate organizations make informed infrastructure decisions supporting long-term performance goals.
Policy advocacy can amplify individual organizational efforts. While companies can optimize their own portfolios, sector-wide transformation may require supportive regulatory frameworks. Building codes mandating performance standards, incentive programs supporting retrofits, and disclosure requirements increasing transparency depend on coordinated advocacy from real estate owners, technology providers, and sustainability organizations.
Capabilities That May Distinguish Future Leaders
Looking ahead 5-10 years, the panelists identify capabilities that may distinguish sector leaders.
Data fluency may become a differentiator. Organizations that effectively collect, analyze, and act on building data may optimize performance compared to those relying primarily on historical patterns and intuition.
Portfolio thinking rather than building-by-building management may enable scale advantages. Platform technologies allow managing multiple buildings as connected systems, sharing learnings and coordinating operations.
Infrastructure investment emerges as an important consideration. Leaders may recognize that network infrastructure represents strategic infrastructure enabling other portfolio objectives. Building owners who underinvest in connectivity may face challenges deploying wellness monitoring, sustainability optimization, and portfolio management capabilities.
Occupant focus may drive competitive positioning. Organizations that design and operate buildings around occupant needs may command premiums as workspace increasingly competes on experience alongside location.
Climate resilience planning may protect asset value. Organizations systematically assessing climate exposure across portfolios and investing in resilience measures - including network infrastructure functioning through disruptions - may protect capital compared to less prepared competitors.
Partnership capability may accelerate innovation adoption. Organizations building effective ecosystem relationships may access specialized capabilities across architecture, engineering, technology, operations, and occupant services. Partnerships between connectivity providers like Cisco, platform operators like Akila, and standards organizations like WELL represent collaborative approaches. Integrated building performance likely requires multiple organizations bringing specialized expertise.
Starting With Infrastructure and Measurement
The panel's advice for building owners and operators emphasizes starting with measurement and the infrastructure foundation enabling it.
Organizations should begin measuring and disclosing building performance data. Transparency can drive improvement by making performance visible and enabling benchmarking. Data collection initiates learning and can reveal optimization opportunities.
However, consistent and reliable measurement requires infrastructure foundation. This means investing in network infrastructure that handles current sensor deployments and scales for future needs. Buildings that defer connectivity infrastructure upgrades may face challenges deploying wellness, sustainability, and optimization technologies.
Platforms delivering portfolio optimization depend on reliable data collection and transmission. Infrastructure represents the essential foundation - the critical first layer enabling other capabilities.
Organizations that integrate wellness standards like WELL, connectivity infrastructure from providers like Cisco, and performance platforms like Akila while maintaining focus on human experience may help define commercial real estate's future. This integration can create buildings that reduce environmental impact, improve occupant health and productivity, and generate financial returns, demonstrating that sustainability and business success can be complementary rather than competing strategies.
The foundation for this transformation is being built through the networks that connect building systems together.
