AI for commissioning and building performance firms. More buildings per engineer.

At a glance

• Who it's for: principals, owners and operations leaders of commissioning, retro-commissioning, energy engineering and building performance firms with $10M+ in annual revenue.
• What Modern Thesis does: AI strategy, change management, implementation and ongoing stewardship, from one team.
• How it starts: a strategic assessment that measures how the work moves today and ranks where AI pays first. See the assessment.
• Where: based in the Denver area, with an office at 11001 W 120th Ave, Ste 400, Broomfield, CO 80021. On site across the Denver metro and Colorado, and remote anywhere in the US.
• What it doesn't do: stamp engineering work, certify compliance for you, or publish a rate card. Each engagement is priced to its scope after a first conversation.

What makes AI different for a commissioning or building performance firm?

Commissioning and building performance work is heavy on data and reports. A project produces functional test results, trend logs, issues logs and a final report, usually following the owner's project requirements and ASHRAE commissioning guidance. Building performance work has grown in Colorado: Denver's Energize Denver policy requires buildings of 25,000 square feet or more to benchmark energy use in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager each year, with reports due June 1,¹ and the state's Building Performance Colorado program covers most commercial buildings of 50,000 square feet or more, with reports due November 1.² That is a lot of repeatable reporting for a small number of qualified engineers.

Where does AI help commissioning and building performance firms?

These are examples of what can be built, not past results:

• Turn functional test results, field notes and photos into draft commissioning reports in the firm's format.
• Screen trend logs for common faults (simultaneous heating and cooling, economizer problems, schedule overrides) and rank them by likely energy impact for an engineer to review.
• Keep the issues log current: assign items, chase responses from contractors and record when each is resolved.
• Gather utility and building data for Energize Denver and Building Performance Colorado reports and flag missing meters or months.
• Draft retro-commissioning findings and measure recommendations with the supporting data attached.

Does AI replace the commissioning engineer?

No. The engineer owns every finding, test judgment and recommendation. AI does the sorting and first drafts: reading trend data, organizing test results and assembling reports. A system that cites the data behind each flag makes the engineer's review faster, which is where the extra capacity comes from.

What does Modern Thesis do here?

Modern Thesis covers four disciplines with one team. In strategy, Jim Coleman and the team map how the work moves through your firm today. In people, we work with engineers and commissioning agents on training and incentives, so they use what gets built. In implementation, our AI specialists and Forward Deployed Engineers build the workflows and connect them to the software you already run. In stewardship, we stay to check accuracy, keep pace with new AI models and report the return against the baseline.

How does an engagement start?

Every engagement starts with a strategic assessment. We sit with the people who do the work, map how it moves through the firm today, and measure a baseline on the workflows that matter most: report hours per project, days from site work to report, trend review hours per building, open issues log items and benchmarking prep time. Then we rank the opportunities by return and define the first build. If AI won't pay for itself somewhere in your business, we'll tell you.

When is something else the better choice?

If your fault detection or energy analytics platform already does the screening and reporting you need, use it fully first. If benchmarking volume is small, a well-run spreadsheet may be enough. If the main need is better writing and email, the ChatGPT or Copilot licenses you already pay for may be enough; our comparison of Copilot or ChatGPT and an AI partner walks through the difference.

How Modern Thesis handles this

We put AI to work inside xFusion, the 70-person company Jim co-founded, and then for several of its clients. For a commissioning or building performance firm, we usually start with report assembly and trend screening, because both scale with the number of buildings. Ongoing stewardship has no set end date, and you own your data, accounts, code and documentation throughout.