Washington-based artificial intelligence startup Noda has launched what it describes as the first agentic AI platform providing round-the-clock automation for commercial building operations, targeting an industry-wide shortage of facility operators. The company, which rebranded to its current name in 2023, operates across a portfolio of 1,200 buildings totaling 350 million square feet, according to data it reported from Salesforce.

Kate Henningsen, CEO of Noda, said the technology was approximately 32 percent accurate a year ago but has since become viable for tackling the workflows of on-site building engineers. The platform maps data points, automates tasks and generates actionable insights with the goal of optimizing building operations, she told Commercial Observer.

"Although people are doing AI in buildings, we have not run across anybody who's tackling the workflows of building engineers on site," Henningsen said. "I think it was probably impossible to do this over a year or 18 months ago, and we haven't seen anybody who was aiding the actions of building operators and engineers in this way."

Henningsen framed the opportunity in financial terms, arguing that every building in a portfolio is leaving net operating income on the table because no team has the capacity to find and fix operational waste at the required speed and scale. "Noda changes that equation," she said. "Our AI runs alongside the team you already have, doing the work of a full engineering organization across every asset, every hour of every day—and the impact shows up directly on the profit and loss statement."

Unlike analytics tools that surface problems for staff to investigate, Noda's platform claims to find, fix and verify the problem and its financial impact across every asset without requiring human intervention. The company says it has eliminated 80 percent of manual workflows across its deployed portfolio and cut the average time from issue identification to completed resolution by 40 percent.

Project execution rates have doubled through AI-driven prioritization, meaning a greater share of identified fixes are converted into realized financial impact, according to Noda's self-reporting based on Salesforce data. Customers are seeing 0.5 to 2 percent NOI growth with a 14x to 20x multiplier on those gains, verified against measured baselines and tied to individual assets, Henningsen said.

The CEO positioned the technology as a response to a broader labor crisis rather than a job-replacement narrative. She cited a $150 billion annual market for building operation expenses and noted a potential labor shortage driven by a 15 percent fill rate for AI-generated recommendations—meaning only 15 percent of work recommendations are being filled by the current labor force.

"This is not a story where AI takes jobs," Henningsen said. "This is a story where if people don't adopt this largest asset class in the world, if it doesn't have the people to run the buildings anymore, there's a real cost and risk to that. So, this is a slightly different AI story than AI is here for everyone's job. I mean, if you can only backfill 15 percent of your roles, there's going to be a crisis."

Henningsen added that the company is leveraging new tools to speed up facilities management operations with mechanical systems. "We're doing a lot of the building engineering and facilities management operations with new tools," she said. "There's great agentic ways to speed up a lot of what these facilities managers are doing with their mechanicals."