Practical AI for FMs: Applied AI-Its not theory anymore

Presented by Billy Holder, CFM, Founder & CEO | Project Aidra | IFMA FM Tech Week 2026 Building inspections have followed the same basic process for roughly 3,000 years. Walk the building, write things down, take pictures, go back to your desk, and reconstruct what you saw. Project Aidra founder Billy Holder built his platform specifically to break that cycle, and this session showed exactly how. The premise is straightforward: facility technicians are good at fixing things, not filling out reports. Project Aidra lets them capture video with any device — a phone, drone, GoPro, Insta360, or smart glasses — upload it to the platform, and let AI handle the rest. The system identifies rooms, classifies assets, logs deficiencies, estimates remediation costs, and generates a completed report in PDF, CSV, or API output ready to push directly into a CMMS or EAM. The session included a live platform demo covering condition assessments, asset management data collection, and thermal image analysis. That last one carries new weight in 2026: the NEC's latest update incorporated NFPA 70B, making annual thermal inspections legally required rather than just best practice. Project Aidra can analyze thermal imagery and produce deficiency reports in the format those standards require. A standout moment from the demo was the asset data capture capability. For teams without a complete or trusted asset registry, a simple video walkthrough can produce a full equipment log including brand, model, serial number, capacity, refrigerant type, and electrical data, all automatically classified and reported. A spatial recognition feature is in testing now, expected by end of summer, that will add room and asset square footage to every report.