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Willow and Microsoft partnered recently on a series of nationwide executive briefings in Dallas, New York City and Redmond. We hosted panels with industry experts joining us from organizations including Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), Walmart, Northern Arizona University, Georgia Southern University, Children’s Health, Brookfield Properties and UT Southwestern Medical Center to tell their stories on how AI and digital twins are shaping built environments.
We heard how leaders across aviation, healthcare, retail, and higher education are adapting to a fast-changing operational landscape. While technologies like AI and digital twins are opening new doors, familiar challenges remain. Systems need to scale across entire enterprises and deliver measurable ROI. They need to drive innovation without disrupting what already works. And above all, the right solution must be secure, reliable, and flexible enough to meet customers where they are, adapting to portfolios that span both legacy infrastructure and modern facilities.
Let’s dive into the top priorities for these leaders as they discuss key problems and solutions with digital twins and AI technologies.
Managing one building is hard. Managing thousands across different geographies, systems, and teams creates complexity that overwhelms most organizations. Data silos grow, tools stay disconnected, and workflows that succeed in a single pilot often collapse under pressure. These inefficiencies directly affect cost and performance.
Currently, Walmart operates in more than 10,000 locations and manages nearly two billion square feet of real estate. It was shared that they execute around 75% of the maintenance work internally, noting their technician workforce is growing to over 8,000.
At DFW, the scale is physical as well as operational. With 11 miles of train systems and hundreds of boarding bridges, the cost of downtime can be enormous.
Willow helped solve this by providing a unified data platform for the airport that spans the entire portfolio. Leaders gain real-time visibility into asset health, maintenance activity, and energy use across all locations. DFW Program manager of digital twins Kelly Watt described using Willow to coordinate Terminal D operations at DFW, identifying problems quickly and allocating resources with accuracy. “Each project works within Willow in a modular approach, so we can address building by building and discipline by discipline.”
Finally, teams can confidently manage operations across large campuses with hundreds of buildings with Willow. Customers use this visibility to optimize repair strategies and technician coverage. They apply it to reduce energy-related costs, extend asset life, and maintain compliance. Built on Microsoft Azure, Willow delivers the scale, reliability, and security needed to support enterprise-wide operations.
Leaders adopting new technology must prove its value quickly. More often than not, operational budgets are tight, expectations are high, and stakeholders need to see returns as soon as possible. Whether the goal is reducing maintenance costs, extending asset life, or cutting energy usage, organizations need clarity that the investment will deliver long-term benefits and short-term wins.
For example, Willow helps uncover cost-saving opportunities early by giving teams visibility into peak energy consumption, asset performance, and maintenance trends across their portfolios. These insights help organizations reduce downtime, respond faster to issues, and shift from reactive to predictive operations.
Ron Stalnaker, VP of Business and Finance at Georgia Southern University, noted the speed of impact, “We saw Willow paying for itself in just 90 days”. DFW shared that even a single hour of outage on a passenger boarding bridge can result in significant lost revenue. Using Willow to act on early indicators, DFW now performs targeted maintenance to reduce downtime, extend asset life and lower energy use. This shift supports the strategic goal to reduce operational costs per square foot by up to 25%.
AI and continuous innovation are critical for operational teams in airports, university facilities, and hospitals. They enable smarter resource management, predictive maintenance, and real-time decision-making. Additionally, staying current with technological advancements is important for teams. It helps them improve safety, efficiency, and service quality, whether it’s optimizing passenger flow, automating campus operations, or enhancing patient care delivery.
Generative AI is further transforming everything from automated reporting to predictive analytics with conversational interfaces. Embracing AI boosts current efficiency and helps future-proof investments by ensuring that infrastructure and systems remain adaptable to evolving technologies and user expectations. In fast-changing environments like hospitals, this adaptability is key to maintaining resilience and long-term value.
Willow helps organizations shift from short-term fixes to long-term operational improvement using AI. The platform tracks whether closed tickets truly resolve root causes, ensuring energy and cost savings are fully realized. In addition, faster onboarding through GenAI-driven knowledge graph generation, intuitive AI-powered workflows, and chain-of-thought conversations with Willow Copilot keep teams engaged with innovative, cost-effective practices.
Technicians at DFW are exploring direct access to the digital twin in the field. They can see where a given asset is located and its work order history, while diagnostics and recommendations from Insights provide additional information on root causing and fixing problems. Managers can combine jobs nearby to reduce the number of trips a technician has to take across a large facility.
Kelly Watt highlighted how AI usage is evolving from troubleshooting to more advanced use cases. “We first started with, ‘I have a fault code 14 on an AHU’, and Willow Copilot would present steps on how to fix it. Now we’re envisioning new use cases for technicians: streamline jobs, prioritize what they’re working on, when they fix it, and how they fix it.”
Capital planning trends across domains reflect a broader shift. Rather than building entirely new facilities, many hospitals are choosing to modernize and expand existing buildings. Meeting growing patient demand, improving operational efficiency, and attracting both staff and patients are key drivers. Renovation allows health systems to upgrade infrastructure and integrate smart technologies like Willow without the high costs and disruptions associated with new construction.
On the education front, universities like Georgia Southern are modernizing operations while preserving historic buildings such as the Armstrong Recreation Center. Northern Arizona University is committed to preserving architectural heritage of century-old structures while adopting AI and digital twins. Ron Stalnaker described this approach. “We did not want to rip and replace systems across the campus,” he noted. “We needed a way to get started with the infrastructure we already had.”
Willow modernizes buildings by creating a data-rich digital replica of the physical environment. It integrates with existing HVAC, lighting, water meters, and energy management systems. By connecting to classroom scheduling systems, universities can infer occupancy patterns and generate actionable insights for space use without adding new infrastructure. IoT sensors on lab equipment, such as fume hoods, further enhance visibility. They enable real-time monitoring of usage, safety compliance, and energy efficiency, even in older campus buildings. With these capabilities, facility teams gain real-time visibility, optimize performance, and predict maintenance needs without major structural changes.
As organizations bring AI and digital twin technology into their operations, security and reliability remain top priorities. From regulatory compliance to contingency plans, data back up and disaster recovery strategies are essential for operational continuity and minimizing downtime and data loss. Without this trust, enterprise-wide adoption is challenging.
Built on Azure, Willow delivers enterprise-grade security and reliability with a fail-safe and secure infrastructure. Fine-grained Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in Willow empowers Administrators in customer organizations to manage end users. Willow is SOC 2 compliant, meeting industry standards for data security, availability, and privacy. With TX-RAMP certification, Willow meets requirements for cloud security and risk management. These capabilities enable Willow to be a trusted solution for hospitals, universities, and airports.
At DFW, unauthorized access to critical systems is a genuine concern, making strong safeguards a requirement. “We have to comply with all of the information security criteria and IT has to sign off on this,” the team shared. “We would not have been able to move forward with investments in operations had our IT department not supported Willow and digital twin adoption.”
For CIO of NAU Steve Burrell, reliability is just as critical as security. “Our partnership with Willow inspires confidence that the system is going to be secure and dependable every single day,” he said. These qualities give customers the confidence to expand automation while maintaining full control of their operations.
Across industries, leaders are showing that AI and digital twins can deliver measurable results. Many companies are now scaling these technologies across entire portfolios, achieving rapid ROI while innovating for the future. They modernize operations without disruption and protect mission-critical systems as they grow. The benefits are immediate: faster decisions, lower costs, less downtime, and a clear path to predictive operations. For organizations ready to tackle today’s challenges and prepare for tomorrow, the future is already taking shape.