Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments8 Jul 2025

00 What is Cafe ZAi and Who Will be Here?

Café ZAi is now open. The built environment is cracking under pressure. Climate, cost, AI, infrastructure, meaning. It’s all happening at once. So we’re opening a café.

Not a conference. Not a webinar. Just 20-minute conversations between industry leaders who are doing the work. Owners, planners, builders, policymakers, technologists, artists, and thinkers, all sitting down at the same table.

This isn’t just a podcast. It’s where we blend BIM, digital twins, AI, culture, semantics, and strategy - not to oversimplify them, but to break down silos and uncover what truly connects.

Episode Zero is now live.

We talk about the roots of café culture and what happened when people like Einstein, Freud, and Čapek shared the exact cultural moment. They were working through the same questions:What does it mean to be human? What happens when intelligence scales faster than understanding?

So we’re taking that same spirit and applying it to our time.

The café sessions will unfold across three evolving ZAi Salons:

Stewards of the Environment: owners, agencies, and decision-makers charged with long-horizon responsibility
Builders, Movers, and Makers: architects, engineers, contractors, and logistics leaders who deliver assets to reality
Interpreters of Complexity: scientists, technologists, artists, and standard-makers working across semantics, AI, and meaning

We’re also surfacing ⁠ZAiMAP.ai⁠ a living, standards-aligned platform built over decades, now opening up for collaboration.

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Episoder(31)

29 Are We Owners or Renters of Our Intelligence?

You are currently renting your own intelligence. And Big Tech is making you pay for the privilege.Every time you use a centralized AI, your data is vacuumed up by a few giants, accelerating a dangerou...

20 Mar 21min

28-The $20 Million Legal Dispute That Changed Construction's Daily Report

A lack of documentation almost cost Peter Lasensky, founder of Command Post, $20 million. His response? He invented a simple, contemporaneous documentation tool using a Nextel walkie-talkie in 2001. H...

16 Mar 21min

27 Got sensors? Got IoT? Got “smart buildings”?

Then why can’t you keep ice cream at the right temperature?Everyone imagines ice cream melting , but the real operational killer is often the opposite: the freezer goes too cold, product gets freezer ...

1 Feb 10min

26 Cross-Pollinating AutomatedBuildings

Cross-Pollinating AutomatedBuildings: Mentorship & BumblebeesAfter more than five decades in the building automation industry, Ken Sinclair has seen it all, from brass pneumatic thermostats and refrig...

27 Jan 27min

25 Stop Protecting the Hill

Data Sharing, IP, and the Future of BuildingsJohn Turner brings decades of hard-earned experience across major global organizations, working from the owner side, leading digital transformation, and pu...

25 Jan 20min

24 Are we living in a simulation? In building AI: yes!

Because the real world hasn’t fully come to the table yet.At NeurIPS Urban AI, I spoke with Fabian Raisch (TU Rosenheim/TU Munich), whose research targets scalable AI-based building control with signi...

22 Jan 9min

23 NVIDIA Urban AI

In this Café ZAi conversation, Kimon Onuma speaks with Zheng (Thomas) Tang from NVIDIA about how synthetic data, computer vision, and digital twins are teaching AI to understand buildings, warehouses,...

15 Des 202512min

22 Teaching an AI How to Learn About HVAC

Donna Vakalis, a postdoc researcher at Mila, Quebec AI Institute, focuses on reducing climate emissions from buildings using AI. Her work involves optimizing HVAC systems without extensive data, emplo...

10 Des 202512min