Willow Recognized in Verdantix Smart Innovators: Building Modeling and Simulation for Energy Management 2026
Verdantix recently published their Smart Innovators: Building Modeling and Simulation for Energy Management 2026 report and recognized Willow for its market-leading Operational AI capabilities, assessed against 17 vendors including Honeywell, Siemens, Schneider Electric, and Trane Technologies.
On operational performance monitoring and digital twin-enabled energy modeling, Willow scored 4 out of 4 for its differentiated depth. Across 10 total capability categories, Willow scored above the market average on 8 of 10.
What is Verdantix?
Verdantix is an independent research and advisory firm whose benchmark reports reach more than 150,000 enterprise decision-makers globally. Their assessments are used to evaluate technology vendors and inform purchasing decisions across sustainability, industrial operations, and the built environment.
What the report covers and where Willow scored
This report benchmarks 17 vendors on building modeling and simulation for energy management: operational performance monitoring, energy forecasting, carbon and emissions modeling, digital twin-enabled energy analysis, grid interaction, and more.
Why this matters: what these capabilities mean in practice
Behind each score is a capability already in production. Here’s what each one looks like when it is running in your buildings.
Predict failures before they happen
Most facilities teams spend most of their time responding to problems that have already occurred. Willow continuously calibrates performance baselines against how each specific building behaves and surfaces issues before they become failures. This capability is what enables the shift from reactive to truly predictive management.
Close the energy loop automatically
Energy modeling has historically lived in planning tools, disconnected from operations. Willow models how your buildings should be performing, identifies the gap, and executes corrections through Active Control: HVAC adjustments, load shifting, demand response, sequencing fixes. Critically, this doesn’t require a fully instrumented building. Willow derives equipment-level energy performance for fans, compressors, pumps, and AHUs from existing BMS telemetry signals with no additional hardware required.
Make carbon a real-time decision
Most carbon reporting describes what already happened. Willow maps each building to its precise grid sub-region and delivers both Average Operating Emissions Rate (AOER) and Marginal Operating Emissions Rate (MOER) in real time and as a forecast, so teams can pre-cool before a high-carbon grid window or shed load when consumption and grid intensity peak simultaneously.
Participate in the grid. Don’t just consume it.
Grid-interactive buildings shift energy loads to off-peak hours, participate in demand response programs, and coordinate distributed energy resources, including battery storage and EV charging infrastructure, against real-time grid conditions. Buildings shift loads to off-peak hours, participate in demand response programs, and move from passive consumers of energy toward active participants in energy markets.
One view of everything, across every system
Underlying all of the above is a unified Knowledge Graph that ingests BMS/HVAC telemetry, utility metering, occupancy signals, weather data, tariff data, and asset metadata into a single digital twin that maps equipment topology, spatial hierarchy, and operational dependencies. Every insight, model, and automated action runs on the same representation of your building.
Get the report
Read the full Smart Innovators: Building Modeling and Simulation for Energy Management 2026 report from Verdantix:
To discuss how Willow’s capabilities apply to your energy management or sustainability program, contact us.