I have spent the past two years watching the same problem play out in three different markets. The technology works. The decisions do not.
In commercial building estates, EMCs manage hundreds of sites across fragmented BMS platforms — Niagara, Honeywell, Schneider, legacy Trend controllers. They have invested in dashboards and alarm management. They have reduced noise. But when a client asks why Building 47 was prioritised over Building 112 last Tuesday, nobody can produce a governed decision trail. The Building Safety Act's golden thread mandate demands exactly this evidence. No platform provides it.
In the heat pump market, the performance gap between well-commissioned and poorly-commissioned installations is staggering. The BEIS field trial recorded a median seasonal performance factor of 2.80. Verified installations by organisations focused on quality achieve 4.40. That gap is not a technology limitation — it is an installation quality problem. Yet the industry still relies on self-reported commissioning checklists. No OEM platform can tell you within 48 hours whether a new installation was correctly commissioned.
In home energy, households are accumulating heat pumps, batteries, solar panels, and smart tariffs. Every device runs its own optimisation logic. Nobody coordinates the whole home. And nobody — not the utility, not the aggregator, not the consumer — can explain why any automated decision was made. Ofgem's AI governance guidance is arriving into a market with zero audit trails.
Three markets. Three technology stacks. One missing layer: governed intelligence.
By "governed" I mean something specific. Every decision the system makes is recorded with its inputs, its reasoning, and its outcome. The evidence trail is auditable — by a building client, by an OEM warranty team, by a regulator, by a homeowner who wants to know why their heating was adjusted at 7pm. This is not a dashboard. It is not another alert stream. It is a decision architecture where every action can be explained and verified.
This matters commercially, not just ethically. An operations director managing 200 buildings needs to explain resource allocation to clients operating pain/gain share contracts. An OEM service director needs to prove that warranty claims stem from installer error, not product defect. A utility innovation leader needs to demonstrate regulatory compliance before Ofgem mandates it. In each case, the value is the same: decisions you can stand behind.
The window for this approach is finite. OEM platforms will mature. Building analytics will consolidate. Utility stacks will be rationalised. Within two to three years, governed decisions will shift from differentiator to expectation. The organisations that embed governance now — into their building operations, their installer networks, their home energy propositions — will have the evidence base, the regulatory credibility, and the customer trust that late movers cannot replicate.
The technology works. It is time the decisions did too.