Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 32 /Jul 17, 2026
Don't buy AI until you fix your data
Jeff Chen, Symetri USA
Jul 17, 2026 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Don't buy AI until you fix your data
Dr. Jeff Chen is the director of digital transformation at Symetri USA, a consultancy for design and construction technology, after running asset data for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Columbia University and Penn Medicine. He has managed the building information owners actually use. His warning is about the AI purchases that produce nothing a CFO can point to.
Jeff Chen, Director of Digital Transformation, Symetri USA
In this conversation
The silent room: a CFO asks what AI has delivered, and the story Jeff hears from firms that bought platforms first and looked for problems later.
His split of level of development into model detail and information detail, and why the second matters more to an owner.
What actually happens when equipment moves after handover, and why refreshing a model of an occupied building rarely happens.
How his team's agent answers a facility director's question by pulling work orders through an API and projecting them onto the model.
You cannot reverse the process: because there's an AI technology here, I'm going to give it to my company. Maybe you don't need it.
Jeff Chen
Chapters
The silent room
The question a CFO asks that most AI projects cannot answer.
By the numbers
Estimated global cost of bad data to the construction industry in 2020
Jeff's CFO cannot see what AI delivered because the data underneath was never fixed. This is what unfixed data costs.
Source: Autodesk and FMI, Harnessing the Data Advantage in Construction (2021) ↗The sweet spot for owners
How much BIM an owner needs, and no more.
Interfaces and the sensor layer
Where the model sits among interfaces, dashboards and sensors.
When the equipment moves
What happens to a digital twin when the building changes.
The model as database
Treating the model as a database rather than a picture.
The user might be the director of the facility. He doesn't know how to use a BIM model, he doesn't know how to use Revit.
Jeff Chen
Takeaways
You cannot reverse the process. Because an AI technology exists does not mean your company needs it; start from the pain point with the highest return, then find the tool.
The facility director will never open Revit. Keep the model simple, make the information rigorous, and let software sit behind the curtain answering 'what should I fix first?'
Set asset-data requirements before construction starts. Design takes two years and construction five; if the requirement is not in the contract, the owner pays for decades.
The AI is always trying to make you happy.
Jeff Chen