Willow, the Operational AI company for the built world, today announced new agentic capabilities that extend its Operational AI into coordinated, multi-step operational workflows and supervised, autonomous action, now live across the building portfolios of Fortune 100 companies in 47 countries. The release marks the next evolution of the platform, expanding the scope, intelligence and autonomy of what Willow’s Operational AI can do across a single building, campus or geographically dispersed portfolio.
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the world’s third-busiest airport, unified more than 171,000 assets across five building systems and three maintenance platforms on Willow. In the past year, the airport realized nearly $4 million in savings through resolved insights, deferred capital replacement and reduced unplanned maintenance, and it is targeting 20% to 25% lower maintenance costs by 2030. Seeing the failures coming was step one. Being able to act on them, at the level of autonomy each customer chooses, is step two.
Buildings Need AI That Acts, Not One That Just Watches
Building operations are among the largest and least intelligent functions on the planet. They consume more than half of the world’s electricity, and they drive nearly 60% of global demand growth as cooling and data center loads have climbed, according to the International Energy Agency. The draw is surging just as the people who understand these building systems disappear, and the grid has no slack left to absorb any waste. More than 68% of U.S. facility operators and technicians are over 45, and nearly 40% of facility managers expect to retire within 10 years, the International Facility Management Association reports. Running equipment to failure only raises the bill. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program estimates that shifting from reactive to preventive maintenance cuts that bill by 30% to 40%. Preventive programs reduce breakdowns and provide savings, but can also trigger unnecessary work or early replacement. Willow goes further by delivering the operational intelligence for predictive maintenance and condition-based monitoring, so less gets replaced, and more gets saved.
From Insight to Action, With Willow Copilot and Agents
Willow’s operational intelligence capabilities progress from understanding what needs attention to taking action. At the foundation is the Willow Insights layer, which senses across hundreds of disconnected built-world systems and millions of live telemetry points. Willow reasons across the operational systems that usually sit apart, from building management and maintenance platforms to energy, IoT and OT, spatial models, documents and enterprise data, and unifies them so a building, a campus or a whole portfolio can be understood together. It maps that data against a digital representation of the building or campus, evaluates issues by consequence and cost, drives intelligent action and remediation and delivers a prioritized daily briefing to facilities teams.
From there, two classes of agents carry the work from insight to action. Workflow Agents address operational coordination by filtering out low-value alarms, establishing root causes across disconnected systems, sequencing maintenance activities and generating and assigning work orders. Control Agents act directly on the equipment. They run functional testing across asset portfolios and adjust based on schedules or occupancy conditions, making changes within the limits each customer sets, from surfacing a recommendation for approval to acting on their own. Willow Copilot gives technicians and executives alike a conversational way to work with the building, whether a technician is tracing a fault or a leader is weighing a capital-planning decision.
Agents are one ingredient of Willow’s operational intelligence stack, working alongside its ontology, the Willow Knowledge Graph, digital twin, insights and Willow Copilot rather than sitting on top of them. And the stack is open. Through Model Context Protocol integration, Willow exposes its operational intelligence to the wider enterprise AI ecosystem, so agents built elsewhere can reason over building context under the access the customer governs, with the same thresholds and audit trail that apply to Willow’s own agents.
Judgment Before Autonomy
The standard for building autonomy is higher than autonomy in software. An incorrect setpoint in a hospital or an airport has real consequences, often varying from room to room. It takes representation and meaning, real-time context, an understanding that conditions are constantly changing, a clear sense of purpose, judgment and the ability to learn from what happens. That is why all agents work within customer-defined limits, including approval thresholds, the option for human override, the ability to roll back and a complete audit trail. Willow then checks whether the action achieved its goal and feeds the result back into the platform, so understanding improves over time.
Plenty of vendors can bolt an AI chatbot onto building data. Willow gives its Copilot and agents the ontology, knowledge graph and digital twin to turn that data into trusted action, with the real-time operational relationships to act with intent instead of pattern-matching. Willow’s Knowledge Graph establishes the relationships between assets, spaces, systems, telemetry, documents and operational history, giving Operational AI the full context to reason about a physical environment. Recent autonomous-control moves in the market tune energy and HVAC, or run a process-industry control room. Willow acts across the whole operating world of a building, campus or geographically dispersed portfolio, from the data hall to the building envelope, IT to OT, insight to action, and correlates a symptom in one system back to its cause in another.
Proof at Enterprise Scale
This next-generation capability operates at scale.
- A global retailer runs Willow across its corporate campuses, covering more than 12.6 million square feet.
- Georgia Southern University moved from reactive to predictive maintenance across more than 100 buildings and saved over $1 million in nine months.
- One of the nation’s premier academic medical institutions runs Willow across its hospitals, where the platform has identified over $6.5 million in direct savings, cost avoidance, and risk per year.
“For years, software has been good at telling building teams what’s wrong and useless at doing anything about it,” said Bert Van Hoof, CEO of Willow. “Our agents change that. They watch the whole building, work out what matters and take action, with our customers deciding how far each one goes on its own. That is the difference between a building that reports and a building that runs.”
About Willow
Willow is the global leader in Operational AI for the built world. The Willow Platform combines digital twin technology, the world’s largest ontology for the built environment and agentic AI to unify data, predict failures, and take autonomous action across buildings, campuses and critical infrastructure. Deployed across 47 countries on six continents, customers report millions in operational savings, from avoided equipment failures and reduced energy costs to compliance, security, and extended asset life. Named Autonomous Decision-Making Platform of the Year by AI Breakthrough and a Microsoft Partner of the Year finalist, Willow serves Fortune 500 enterprises, leading global organizations, and major airports, health systems, and universities. To learn more, visit www.willowinc.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260929999212/en/
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