The agent is rented. The data is owned.

Almost every pitch I hear in property technology now has an AI agent in it. An agent that tunes the chillers. An agent that answers tenant tickets. An agent that writes the monthly energy report.

Many of them work. That is exactly why I don’t think the agent is where the value will stay.

The agent is rented

Most of these products sit on top of the same few foundation models. What one vendor’s agent can do this year, a competitor’s will do next year, and a general-purpose assistant may do the year after. A capability anyone can rent isn’t a moat. It’s a utility.

What can’t be rented is the thing the agent works on: years of clean, consistent, well-labelled data about how a specific building actually behaves. Which sensors drift. Which floors run hot in May. What the plant did the last time the grid was tight.

So my advice to building owners is simple. Own the data layer, and rent the agents. Keep an independent layer that collects and tags data from every system in a common vocabulary, such as Brick or Haystack, and let agents plug into it and be swapped out. That is a horizontal architecture. The alternative, where each vendor keeps its own data in its own box, means you start from zero every time you change suppliers.

It also means you rarely need to rip anything out. Most of the gain comes from software laid over equipment that is already installed. Overlay and optimise first. Replace only what the data says is beyond saving.

“Vendor-neutral” is now everyone’s slogan

A few years ago, being vendor-neutral was what made an AI start-up different from the big equipment makers. Then the equipment makers started buying or backing those start-ups. Trane, for example, completed its acquisition of the AI-HVAC company BrainBox AI in January 2025. Now almost everyone claims to be neutral.

Here is the problem. When the company that sells the equipment also sells the software that reports how much the equipment saved, neutrality is not something it can credibly offer. Its dashboards may be accurate. They are still marketing.

The protocol most of the industry relies on doesn’t settle this either. IPMVP, the international standard for measuring and verifying energy savings, allows verification to be done by an independent party or by the project’s own developer.

So I think the lasting position isn’t another agent. It’s the referee: someone who measures savings to a recognised standard and whose revenue doesn’t depend on the number coming out high. The organisation reporting the savings shouldn’t be the one paid to demonstrate them.

Facility management splits in two

AI will change facility management jobs, but I don’t think the story is simply “fewer people”.

One half of the work is closing tickets: dispatching, scheduling, chasing, reporting. AI will route more of that, schedule more of it and do some of it outright.

The other half is turning building data into capital decisions. Which floors to consolidate. Which chiller to keep running for five more years and which to replace. Which building deserves the scarce megawatts. That work gets more valuable, because the data finally exists to do it properly.

The people who do well will be the ones who move from the first half to the second. In my own terms, from technician to capital allocator.

Underwrite the megawatts you can switch on

One more change, closer to home. In Taiwan, the number that matters for a data-centre site is no longer the land. It’s the power, and there are two very different power numbers.

As of the end of July 2026, Taipower had received 75 transmission-level requests from data centres for a combined 4,523 MW. The four sites actually receiving power had 303.5 MW of contracted capacity. As the Taipei Times put it, the larger figure “is not active demand, approved capacity, contracted capacity or an energized load.”

Underwrite the smaller number. A site with a connection date is an asset. A site with an application is an option.

What I’m watching

Owners asking for their data back in procurement contracts, as a condition of signing.

Savings reports with a named, independent verifier becoming normal in deals.

Facility roles rewritten around decisions, not tickets.

These are my personal views, based on public information. They don’t describe any employer’s plans.

The agent is rented. The data is owned.