Ryan (Bianca Howard's Columbia PhD student) decarb chatbot and building-plan AI work, contracted via NYSERDA. Implications for NYCA / consultant disintermediation.
Marc (CRO) — 2026-02-23 16:44
Ryan, A PhD student who was in my class last year is doing these sprints as part of a contract Professor Bianca Howard has with NYSERDA. This engagement is being guided by both engineering and real estate interest types (ASHRAE and REBNY for folks who like acronyms). Per Ryan, "took a week or so to figure out the first time and then a few days to improve it after everything I have learned from the working group!"
@François (HoPlatform)... sorry I missed your presentation on Friday.... note sure if there is anything useful to learn here? He only uploaded a few primary data sets, one of which (LL87) is an amalgamation of some (on average) bad judgement by energy auditors.
access create an account here: https://huggingface.co/organizations/NYSERDA-CRE-Working-Group/share/lZFYxQIoLUCPKNnxdiJWpdgtTbPCZzFaZO
He also described another project he is working on that allows building owners to interact with their plans. As part of this he uploaded the entire NYC building code. I see this as more of a new construction thing. And the request to do this was definitely coming directly from real estate (he mentioned Douglaston Development in particular for this one). Based on his description, a building owner can upload their PDF building plans and ask questions like, "does this design comply with code?"
Marc (CRO) — 2026-02-23 16:47
@Jon (Customer Success Lead) to tie this to my other string.... if (when!) we have a chat bot that sucks up all the BKB as well as continued video documentation of calls with boards and owners... ntm market pricing on different tech and contractor NPS score you can't get anywhere else.... I believe that it is just a matter of time before this bot gets better than a typical junior engineer / account manager type at many tasks that are right now squarely in the consulting sphere. What do we all think about this? And what does our POV mean about how we should be engaging with consultant service providers through NYCA over the next 3, 6 and 12 months? What is their role with a smarter Momentum? By the same token.... hard to imagine that Douglaston expects to pay for stuff like plan review checks against (rules based) green certification standards like LEED, etc. at some point in the near to mid term. Reminds me of the project that two owners (Fairstead and L&M) want to do right now that involves feeding a bunch of flextech reports into an AI toold so that they don't have to pay 50k for these reports anymore....
Marc (CRO) — 2026-02-23 16:49
@François (HoPlatform) even if there is still a long way to go, I can definitely see this chatbot thing being highly reinforcing of our ability to develop pipelines of repeatable projects.
Jon (Customer Success Lead) — 2026-02-23 17:08
@Marc (CRO) Thanks for sharing! I don't have a super detailed take yet but agree that that agents + momentum have the potential to displace some piece of the consultant/analytic role in the current process. But what that future service model looks like is not yet clear to me. The AI can only work on data sources that exist, so part of how we make this a reality is also building the data sets to train the Agents.
François (HoPlatform) — 2026-02-23 18:32
I took a quick look at the chat bot: it's got good fundamentals, but to Jon's point on data + agent, in my limited testing I've seen it struggling on getting the data right (issues with address matching, need to give BBL) and it's limited on fines calculations. Still a good demo, but I think we're on track to do much better, because we have better data.
Strategy Notebook
Ryan (Bianca Howard's Columbia PhD student) decarb chatbot and building-plan AI work, contracted via NYSERDA. Implications for NYCA / consultant disintermediation.
Columbia AI projects — Feb 23, 2026 #
Source: #strategy-huddle
Marc (CRO) — 2026-02-23 16:44 Ryan, A PhD student who was in my class last year is doing these sprints as part of a contract Professor Bianca Howard has with NYSERDA. This engagement is being guided by both engineering and real estate interest types (ASHRAE and REBNY for folks who like acronyms). Per Ryan, "took a week or so to figure out the first time and then a few days to improve it after everything I have learned from the working group!" @François (HoPlatform)... sorry I missed your presentation on Friday.... note sure if there is anything useful to learn here? He only uploaded a few primary data sets, one of which (LL87) is an amalgamation of some (on average) bad judgement by energy auditors.
access create an account here: https://huggingface.co/organizations/NYSERDA-CRE-Working-Group/share/lZFYxQIoLUCPKNnxdiJWpdgtTbPCZzFaZO
chatbot link: https://huggingface.co/spaces/NYSERDA-CRE-Working-Group/Modern_Decarb_Chatbot
He also described another project he is working on that allows building owners to interact with their plans. As part of this he uploaded the entire NYC building code. I see this as more of a new construction thing. And the request to do this was definitely coming directly from real estate (he mentioned Douglaston Development in particular for this one). Based on his description, a building owner can upload their PDF building plans and ask questions like, "does this design comply with code?"
Marc (CRO) — 2026-02-23 16:47 @Jon (Customer Success Lead) to tie this to my other string.... if (when!) we have a chat bot that sucks up all the BKB as well as continued video documentation of calls with boards and owners... ntm market pricing on different tech and contractor NPS score you can't get anywhere else.... I believe that it is just a matter of time before this bot gets better than a typical junior engineer / account manager type at many tasks that are right now squarely in the consulting sphere. What do we all think about this? And what does our POV mean about how we should be engaging with consultant service providers through NYCA over the next 3, 6 and 12 months? What is their role with a smarter Momentum? By the same token.... hard to imagine that Douglaston expects to pay for stuff like plan review checks against (rules based) green certification standards like LEED, etc. at some point in the near to mid term. Reminds me of the project that two owners (Fairstead and L&M) want to do right now that involves feeding a bunch of flextech reports into an AI toold so that they don't have to pay 50k for these reports anymore....
Marc (CRO) — 2026-02-23 16:49 @François (HoPlatform) even if there is still a long way to go, I can definitely see this chatbot thing being highly reinforcing of our ability to develop pipelines of repeatable projects.
Jon (Customer Success Lead) — 2026-02-23 17:08 @Marc (CRO) Thanks for sharing! I don't have a super detailed take yet but agree that that agents + momentum have the potential to displace some piece of the consultant/analytic role in the current process. But what that future service model looks like is not yet clear to me. The AI can only work on data sources that exist, so part of how we make this a reality is also building the data sets to train the Agents.
François (HoPlatform) — 2026-02-23 18:32 I took a quick look at the chat bot: it's got good fundamentals, but to Jon's point on data + agent, in my limited testing I've seen it struggling on getting the data right (issues with address matching, need to give BBL) and it's limited on fines calculations. Still a good demo, but I think we're on track to do much better, because we have better data.