PODCAST · technology
Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments
by Kimon
Café Zai is a short podcast where urgent conversations meet real action. Hosted by architect and systems thinker Kimon Onuma, FAIA, each episode brings together doers and disruptors from architecture, digital twins, BIM, GIS, AI, semantics, and beyond, all sitting at the same virtual table. No slides. No scripts. Just sharp dialogue and real work behind the scenes. From digital twins to standards to resilience, we connect the dots. You’re invited to listen in, and when you’re ready, pull up a chair. This is Café Zai.
Episodes
-
Who Should AI Trust? Connecting Decentralized Trust and Smart Buildings
Who should AI trust? Earlier this year, I met Drummond Reed at the KWAAI conference at Scale 23x, where he was presenting on decentralized trust. I asked him a question: Could decentralized trust apply to buildings? It wasn’t a use case he had been thinking about. As we talked through people,...
-
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 dangerous consolidation of power. But there is an even bigger physical threat: energy. If Artificial...
-
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. Hear his 30-year journey from being one of San Diego's largest builders to creating Command Post…
more -
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 burn, and inventory is lost. This episode is a field note as I prep to fly to AHR in Vegas —...
-
26 Cross-Pollinating AutomatedBuildings
Cross-Pollinating AutomatedBuildings: Mentorship & Bumblebees After more than five decades in the building automation industry, Ken Sinclair has seen it all, from brass pneumatic thermostats and refrigerator-sized computers to cloud platforms, digital twins, and AI. As the founder of...
-
25 Stop Protecting the Hill
Data Sharing, IP, and the Future of Buildings John Turner brings decades of hard-earned experience across major global organizations, working from the owner side, leading digital transformation, and pushing real-world BIM and digital twin strategies at scale. In this Café Zai session, John Turner...
-
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 significant potential: improving efficiency by 10–50%, depending on building conditions and systems....
-
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, and cities. The discussion explores “outside-in” safety, multi-camera perception, and why seeing...
-
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, employing data-efficient reinforcement learning. Vakalis' research aims to create agents that can...
-
21 Buildings are Giant Robots
A Columbia robotics researcher and a Google AI engineer join Café Zai to ask why our buildings, giant robots in disguise, are still asleep. About the Guest: Judah Goldfeder is a researcher at Columbia University’s robotics and dynamic systems lab and an AI researcher at Google, where he works on...
-
20 Seven Deadly BIMs
Kimon Onuma and Cyril Verley trade confessions from decades inside the BIM and digital twin world. From hoarding data and chasing flashy visuals to selling LOD 500 models that nobody could use, they name the “Seven Deadly BIMs” and discuss how the industry can find redemption through open data,...
-
19 Greenbuild LA 2025 Day 2 : Kimon Onuma
Join Kimon Onuma as he takes you behind the scenes of the US Green Building Council's 2025 LA Conference, where sustainability meets cutting-edge technology. In this episode, Kimon shares his insights from a day packed with innovative discussions about AI, green design, and the future of...
-
18 Greenbuild LA 2025 Day 1 : Kimon Onuma
AI and Standards. Real-time Café Zai reflections from Day 1 at Greenbuild 2025. Kimon Onuma pushes back on the corporate sustainability script and narrative, and calls out architects for hiding behind PDFs and being afraid to share their secret sauce with AI. An unfiltered Café Zai update…
more -
17 It’s Alive! No More Dead Data
Reanimating buildings with living, owner-run data. Kimon Onuma and Cyril Verley crack open why “living” planning beats glossy shelfware master plans. Fresh from Tradeline, they map how to turn a static master plan into an owner-run data product: across assets/spaces/projects, you can actually...
-
16 Capital, Energy, & Intelligence: Data-Center Reality with Amy Polvado
Data is changing real estate. Amy Polvado breaks down the density story—capital, energy, and intelligence—inside today’s data centers. We unpack why “dollars not square feet” matters, how higher rack power reshapes sites, where cooling and water go, and why handovers still miss critical...
-
15 The Soul, the Silence, and the Twin with Chikara Inamura
When a building is completed, it often stops talking to us. All the knowledge, intelligence, and memory that shaped it disappear into the walls. In this Café Zai conversation, Kimon Onuma and Chikara Inamura, Director of Digital Technology at CO Architects, explore what it means for a building to...
-
14 BIM Data Saves the Most Important Asset: Lives
Café Zai with Fire Chief Victor Esch: Other Café Zai podcasts have focused on how we design, construct, and operate facilities and assets. My conversation with Victor Esch is about what happens when those facilities are on fire. Firefighters are asked to risk their lives to save others, but too...
-
13 When AI Meets openBIM
AI is reshaping the built environment, and it demands structured, open data. In this Café Zai episode, Kimon Onuma meets with BuildingSmart USA industry leaders to explore how decades of buildingSMART standards are now becoming the fuel for both humans and machines. opnBIM standards are now have...
-
12 Before CAD (BC) to BIM Clash & Burn
Kimon Onuma and Cyril Verley trace the evolution of architecture’s digital journey, from hand drafting, to early CAD experiments, to the rise of BIM and Revit. Cyril shares firsthand stories from Skidmore, Goody Clancy, Autodesk, and HOK, where clash detection became BIM’s first killer app…
more -
11 Calling Uber with a PDF: The Absurdity of Facility and Asset Data Today
Most owners are still trying to manage their facilities and assets with static PDFs and mutating Excel files, like calling an Uber by downloading a spreadsheet of cars. From projects to existing buildings to business plans, the result is a virus that mutates into a plague: endless rework, wasted...
-
10 Jack Dangermond on the Nervous System of the Planet : A Café ZAi Conversation
I asked Jack Dangermond for 5 minutes… he gave me 52. In this uncut extended Café Zai conversation, recorded live at ESRI HQ during the buildingSMART USA 2025 event, Jack shares his candid thoughts on: Why collaboration happens at the speed of trust How GIS and BIM are converging into a true…
more -
09 Donuts, Silos, and the Shape of Asset Failure
Silos are the clogged arteries of your buildings. Time to change the diet. If you only feed your buildings and assets donuts, don’t be surprised when they get sick. In this Café Zai conversation, Michael Bordenaro of the Asset Leadership Network recalls Jack Dempsey’s observation: “Asset…
more -
08 Why Buildings Are the Gift That Keeps on Taking — and What to Do About It
Cameron Christensen grew up with a front-row seat to pioneering work in facility asset management. His father, Doug Christensen, literally wrote the book on Total Cost of Ownership — Building Total Enterprise Asset Management Solutions — and famously said: “Buildings… the gift that keeps on...
-
07 Your Shiny Building Smells like Rotten Data and Deferred Maintenance
New Café ZAi Episode, with Birgitta Foster That new building smell? It fades. Then it starts to smell like budget gaps, moldy ductwork, outdated spreadsheets……and the LEED Platinum plaque still gleaming on the wall. Welcome to the post-ribbon-cutting reality, where sustainability goals crash into...
-
06 The System Is the Problem: Asset Management, ROI, and the Case for Total Strategy
We’ve been making the same mistakes for decades. Jack Dempsey isn’t afraid to say it, and in this 3-minute clip from our Café Zai conversation, he breaks down why the system is designed to fail, not just in federal facilities, but across the entire built environment. I set it up by pointing out...
-
05 A Caffeinated Journey to the Metaverse and Beyond with Paul Doherty
Paul calls himself a “recovering architect,” but that’s underselling it. He’s been quietly shaping the smart city and metaverse discourse for decades, while most of us were still arguing about CAD vs BIM. In this session, we go full-circle: from the DNA of IBM trade show booths in the ’80s… to AI...
-
04 Total Cost At UT Austin with Ana Thiemer
Ana Thiemer, Director of Operations Support at UT Austin, joins me for a powerful 20-minute conversation on Total Cost of Ownership, what it really means, where we’ve made progress, and what still needs to change. Ana doesn’t sugarcoat it:There’s no easy button. TCO is a culture shift, not just a...
-
03 From Rolled Drawings in the Basement… to Talking to your Building with Russ Sanders
From rolled drawings in the basement… to talking to your building.” In this new episode of Café ZAi, I meet with longtime friend and early BIM pioneer Russ Sanders, now VP of Design Integration at McCarthy. Russ is leading some of the most complex projects in the Southwest, including major...
-
02 BIG BIM, BIG ZAi, BIG Everything: with Finith Jernigan, FAIA Emeritus
In this Café ZAi session, Kimon Onuma meets with Finith Jernigan, author of BIG BIM little bim, for a fast-paced, insightful conversation on the state of architecture, BIM, and the rise of AI. They revisit the early promise of BIM, the persistent challenges of a document-driven industry, and how...
-
01 Total Cost, Total Clarity – A Conversation with Deke Smith, FAIA Emeritus, FbSI
Episode 01 | Deke Smith: From First Cost to Total Cost At Café Zai, conversations spark change. In this premiere episode, Deke Smith brings decades of insight to the table. A longtime advocate for BIM, digital twins, and total cost of ownership, Deke shares hard truths about why the built...
-
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,...
-
Café ZAi: Intelligence for Informed Environments - Introduction
Café Zai is a 20-minute podcast where urgent conversations meet real action. Hosted by architect and systems thinker Kimon Onuma, FAIA, each episode brings together doers and disruptors from architecture, digital twins, BIM, GIS, AI, semantics, and beyond, all sitting at the same virtual table.…
more
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Café Zai is a short podcast where urgent conversations meet real action. Hosted by architect and systems thinker Kimon Onuma, FAIA, each episode brings together doers and disruptors from architecture, digital twins, BIM, GIS, AI, semantics, and beyond, all sitting at the same virtual table. No slides. No scripts. Just sharp dialogue and real work behind the scenes. From digital twins to standards to resilience, we connect the dots. You’re invited to listen in, and when you’re ready, pull up a chair. This is Café Zai.
HOSTED BY
Kimon
CATEGORIES
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments have?
Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments currently has 32 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments about?
Café Zai is a short podcast where urgent conversations meet real action. Hosted by architect and systems thinker Kimon Onuma, FAIA, each episode brings together doers and disruptors from architecture, digital twins, BIM, GIS, AI, semantics, and beyond, all sitting at the same virtual table. No...
How often does Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments release new episodes?
Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments has 32 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments?
You can listen to Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments?
Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments is created and hosted by Kimon.
URL copied to clipboard!