We’ve spent decades modeling buildings. Now, it’s time for buildings to model us back.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a radical acceleration in how digital technology is integrated into physical infrastructure. From IoT sensors and AI-powered energy dashboards to real-time digital twins, the built environment is finally catching up with the intelligence age. But these advancements have only scratched the surface of what’s possible.
I like to use the term hyper-intelligent building, or HIB for short. It’s a platform, a program, and a philosophy for transforming existing buildings into responsive, conversational, self-improving systems. And like any strong foundation, HIB is just the beginning. Our next chapter is the launch of hyper-intelligent communities (HIC), a persistent, AI-driven metaverse where buildings, stakeholders, and their data live, collaborate, and evolve together.
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This isn’t a tech fantasy. It’s the logical extension of what happens when you combine AI, blockchain, immersive environments, and quantum computing with one of the world’s most valuable assets: buildings.
Hyper-intelligent buildings aren’t hypothetical. They’re already in play. Under Canada’s Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) program, my organization is working with Public Services and Procurement Canada to implement HIB in federal infrastructure. These buildings go far beyond BIM. They include real-time data integration, GPT-powered interfaces that let stakeholders “ask the building” for insights, and a certification system that scores how intelligent, efficient, and ESG-compliant each structure truly is.
But even intelligent buildings need a place to live. That’s what HIC aims to provide: a connected metaverse where entire building portfolios, their AI agents, and human stakeholders coexist.
In a hyper-intelligent community, every building has an avatar. These avatars aren’t just marketing gimmicks, they’re functional, responsive digital entities that act as leasing agents, energy consultants, and compliance monitors. They carry the accumulated intelligence of their building, updated in real time, and act on behalf of owners, managers, or even tenants.
A leasing tour becomes a conversation with the building itself. A tenant complaint triggers not just a work order, but a series of optimizations. A government auditor walks through a digital twin, receives automated ESG compliance verification, and leaves with a blockchain-stamped report.
The future of real estate isn’t just smarter buildings. It’s smarter communities made up of intelligent nodes that learn from one another.
Human Drones
To realize this future at scale, we face a simple but daunting challenge: how do you digitize millions of square feet of existing buildings affordably and efficiently?
The answer isn’t more technicians. It’s smarter workflows, and smarter people using smarter tools. Planit is developing a method for real-time BIM generation using gig-economy “human drones.” These aren’t traditional surveyors or modelers. They’re everyday people, equipped with powerful scanning devices and AI assistants, capable of walking a building and generating an accurate, real-time digital twin without needing to understand CAD or Revit.
The real magic lies in the feedback loop. These technicians not only collect data, they help the AI model learn by identifying objects in point clouds as they go. Their cognitive input becomes training data, enhancing the AI’s ability to recognize and model complex environments. And yes, they get paid for that too.
I envision a future where thousands of human drones are scanning cities in real time, feeding into a growing HIC ecosystem. The built world becomes legible, up-to-date, and interconnected—at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
So, how does this all get monetized? The answer lies in platforms and ecosystems, not projects.
The HIC is being designed as a platform with multiple revenue streams. Building owners subscribe to intelligence services. Third-party providers offer value-added applications in energy, leasing, insurance, or compliance. Stakeholders pay for access to verified building data, and scanning agents receive rewards for helping maintain and expand the ecosystem.
Eventually, these transactions will be underpinned by a tokenized economy. Crypto-currencies and tokenization will enable secure, transparent microtransactions within HIC. Need an up-to-date floor plan? Pay a small token fee. Want to train your AI leasing agent using benchmark data from other Class A office buildings in your city? Buy access through a smart contract. Buildings themselves become economic agents, generating value and exchanging services in a self-sustaining marketplace.
This will require standards, governance, and transparency, but those are solvable problems. The foundation is already being built.
One of the most exciting shifts I foresee is in how we define building performance. Current standards, like LEED, focus on energy consumption and material efficiency. These are important, but they’re not enough.
As AI begins to quantify the true impact of space on people, productivity, comfort, cognitive performance, and wellness, new standards will emerge. We’ll begin valuing buildings not just for how little they consume, but for how much they contribute to the humans inside them.
Occupant comfort will drive value. Buildings that enhance well-being will become premium assets. The digital records of their performance, verified across time and users, will become a form of digital real estate equity. And as buildings learn from each other within the HIC ecosystem, we’ll see the emergence of generativity designed structures, shaped not by architects alone, but by millions of data points from across the globe.
All of this leads to a larger idea: we don’t just need a real estate metaverse. We need a metaverse of metaverses, a fully connected layer of intelligent digital environments that overlap sectors: real estate, healthcare, education, governance, and more.
HIC will be just one domain in this broader ecosystem. But it will be a critical one, because buildings are where people live, work, learn, and heal. They are the physical hubs of human civilization. Making them intelligent, responsive, and interactive is not just good business, it’s essential infrastructure.
We believe that the avatars that populate this world, trained AI agents embedded in buildings, will become the next generation of property managers, leasing agents, and operational specialists. But unlike their human predecessors, they’ll never sleep, never forget, and never stop learning.
The journey from Hyper-Intelligent Buildings to Hyper-Intelligent Communities is already underway. From there, we’ll move toward intelligent cities, countries, and eventually, a digital twin of the world—a self-aware layer of infrastructure that learns, adapts, and evolves with us. It won’t happen all at once. But the building blocks are here. AI. Quantum computing. Blockchain. Real-time scanning. Immersive 3D environments. Each is a tool, but together, they are the future. At Planit, we’re committed to shaping that future, boldly, responsibly, and with purpose. Because the question is no longer whether buildings will become intelligent. The question is: will we build the intelligence they need to serve humanity better?
