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From Sydney to Melbourne to Brisbane, Willow’s Australia Tour brought together leaders across medical, K-12 education, higher ed, and enterprise operations to explore how AI and Willow are transforming the way organizations manage and optimize their buildings. We kicked off the tour with an announcement of Willow Copilot General Availability. Willow Copilot is transforming building management by providing a conversational interface to the Knowledge Graph, and other customer data, empowering teams to quickly find, understand, and act on information.
Joining us in a demo and panel discussion followed by a series of multi-city sessions were Julio Garcia, VP of Global Workforce at Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Nathan Lyon, Head of Building Technology at Investa Property Group, Dr. Marc Nivet, Executive VP, UT Southwestern hospital, and Trey Davis, CIO at Broward County Public Schools in Florida. Attendees saw firsthand how AI in products like Willow Copilot is becoming an everyday operational partner with a natural language interface to unified data for all systems within a building. It’s speeding up decision-making and helping teams realize measurable outcomes faster.
Here are key takeaways from our discussions.
From O&M (Operations and Maintenance) manuals and knowledge-bases to live data from sensors, buildings generate and utilize a lot of data every single day. Traditionally, this data is siloed across teams and individuals. UT Southwestern shared, “When an employee leaves, we lose that knowledge.” This challenge spans across industries. As experienced technicians retire, buildings face a universal challenge in preserving institutional knowledge and ensuring continuity across operations. Further, this siloed data is traditionally made available for consumption across a variety of tools and experiences that teams must first get trained to use. With Willow Copilot, all this information is consolidated and is just a prompt away for all stakeholders.
HPE shared that both live data on how the building is operating as well as static data associated with manuals and the knowledge base become accessible. “Being able to use natural language to really understand and interpret all the data is extremely valuable.” Investa agreed. Willow Copilot helps teams retrieve the exact details they need in context. It can also deliver broad summaries across large data sets from multiple systems. “You know, we’ve gone from this broad nature of information availability right down to a narrow realm of surfacing the relevant piece of information that’s appropriate for the audience at that time. It gives immediate value and clarity on action to take”.
For modern facility management, real-time monitoring of HVAC is becoming table stakes. Our speakers shared unique use cases their organizations have. HPE deploys Aruba access points and has connected devices in buildings. Managing device health is critical to minimize downtime and keep information workers productive. Across domains, there are energy efficiencies to be realized from utilities data. For corporate campuses as well as real estate management, easy and conversational access to tenants’ lease expiration data can optimize workflows.
Traditionally, building management systems focus on anomalies and generating alarms which keeps facility teams in a constantly reactive mode. Investa shared, “It’s equally important to know when things are green and alarm free. This frees up the team to undertake other activities. It even frees up mental bandwidth to focus on strategic objectives, which is really critical for our teams.” With Willow Copilot, Investa is able to run a customized daily briefing that highlights status across systems – whether it’s working as expected, needing attention or in a critical state.
When a room reports excessive cooling and drop in comfort level, a technician needs to understand the issue in terms of damper positions to remediate. A CFO may need to understand the same issue in terms of energy consumption impact and avoidable cost. Attendees agreed that making insights available to the right person or to the right audience is important because it’s not a one-size-fits-all.
Willow Copilot can explain a technical problem to key stakeholders and also explain the same issue with high specificity and depth to an engineer. “The Head of Real Estate may require a very different type of response compared to those that are on the frontline.” Facility Engineers can converse to understand diagnostics, identify root cause, ask for a summary to put into closing notes and complete work orders. Executives can ask for summaries and reports spanning the entire portfolio to understand which assets are the most problematic or where the largest opportunities for avoidable cost are.
Willow Copilot speaks everyone’s language figuratively as well as literally. For global campuses like HPE has, users can seamlessly switch on the fly from English to Spanish to Japanese.
Accuracy of data in responses is critical to maintain customer confidence and product engagement. This aligns with what we heard from Investa. “As soon as something’s not quite right, we have an excuse to not use that platform any longer or pay any attention to those queries. Having the ability to test and validate is critical. As the old saying goes, ‘Trust but verify’. Validations must be built into the query responses.”
Willow Copilot offers citations in responses that reference the source as a mechanism to prevent hallucination. It is grounded in customer data in the knowledge graph in terms of models, insights, work orders, documents and Last Known Value of telemetry points. This data is also accessible via traditional UX and a Public API, making it verifiable.
In energy management, ROI is a proof point that turns sustainability goals into investments as efficiency gains translate into measurable cost savings. This resonates across industries. UT Southwestern has a tripartite mission. It’s a traditional hospital taking care of a million patients a year. It is an academic institution with a very large medical school. It’s also an $800 million research institution. Energy savings are critical as all revenue is invested back into the mission of raising the next generation of medical students and in cutting edge research. “We were able to see immediate savings with Willow.”
We heard a similar narrative from Broward County, the 6th largest school district in the US with over 250,000 students and 30,000 faculty and staff, and an expenditure of $60 million a year on electricity. “Public Education K-12 is in financial crisis, with declining enrollments.” So, the team came up with a creative strategy. “We’re going to save money with facilities management and redirect it towards education to make this a world-class school district in the next five years. We’ve dubbed this the Broward model. It’s replicable across every school district in the country going through the same type of issues.”
The conversation around AI has shifted from possibility to execution. With Willow Copilot, organizations are proving new ways to bring optimizations into daily operations, strengthen collaboration across teams, and turn previously siloed data into tangible outcomes. The lessons shared will continue shaping how organizations re-envision building management in this new era with concrete and measurable ROI, across Australia, the US and the global Willow community.