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Edge AI Is Coming to Buildings. 

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By

Nick Dutton


Edge AI Is Coming to Buildings.
Wiring Every Endpoint Is Not a Scalable Plan 

As intelligent endpoint counts rise, building teams will need to rethink whether wiring-heavy deployment models can still scale.

Building automation has spent years proving its value. Smarter lighting, HVAC optimization, air quality monitoring, occupancy awareness, access control, and predictive maintenance can all improve efficiency, reduce waste, and strengthen operational control. Research from the Association for Smarter Homes & Buildings shows that organizations continue to pursue smart building technology for cost reduction, efficiency, sustainability, resilience, and modernization.

What is changing now is the scale of the opportunity.

Edge AI is pushing more intelligence into sensors, controllers, gateways, and local building systems. That means the next generation of smart buildings will not simply have more connected devices. They will have more devices making local decisions, filtering events, identifying patterns, and reducing dependence on constant cloud-side interpretation. As that shift gathers pace, building managers, installers, and IT teams face a more important infrastructure question: as endpoint density rises, does it still make sense to connect everything with wire?

Edge AI changes the connectivity equation

For years, building connectivity could often be planned around a relatively modest number of endpoints. A few control systems, a defined set of sensors, and fixed infrastructure pathways made wiring feel like the default answer. Edge AI changes that assumption.

Once intelligence starts moving into more endpoints, the practical number of devices grows. More environmental sensing. More localized condition monitoring. More distributed controls. More data collection at the edge. More opportunities to act earlier and with greater precision.

That is strategically important because Edge AI is only as useful as the infrastructure beneath it. If deploying more intelligence means pulling more cable, opening more ceilings, coordinating more labor, and stretching ROI further into the future, the infrastructure model itself becomes part of the problem.

The real obstacle is often physical, not digital

Smart building projects rarely fail because building owners do not understand the value of data. They more often stall because installation is expensive, disruptive, and difficult to justify at scale.

ASHB’s 2025 survey found that the most-cited challenge to smart building adoption was the high initial cost of purchase and implementation, followed by cybersecurity concerns, ongoing operating cost, compatibility with existing systems, and lack of in-house skills.

That matters most in retrofits and live-building environments, where every additional wired endpoint can introduce extra planning, access work, termination, testing, remediation, and operational disruption. Earlier ACEEE research made a similar point, noting that wireless smart controls and sensors are retrofit-friendly and can have lower installation and commissioning costs than wired devices.

In other words, the challenge is not just technology selection. It is deployment friction.

Wiring has a cost beyond cable

When people think about wiring cost, they often focus on materials. In practice, labor usually dominates. Current commercial cabling references commonly place a standard Cat6 drop at roughly $100 to $250 installed, with harder Cat6A or retrofit-heavy runs often reaching $200 to $350 or more per drop. Some current installer references also estimate labor at roughly 60% to 70% of total project cost.

Installation elementTypical cost signalWhy it matters
Standard commercial Cat 6 drop$100 to $250 per dropCosts multiply quickly across many endpoints
Harder Cat 6A / retrofit drop$200 to $350+ per dropOlder buildings and tougher access conditions push cost upward
Labor share of project cost~60% to 70%Labor, not raw cable, often becomes the bigger budget issue

These are directional market figures, not universal prices. Actual numbers vary by region, building type, access constraints, cable type, permit requirements, and working-hour restrictions. The strategic point is simpler: once endpoint counts start rising, wiring-heavy deployment models become much harder to scale economically.

More endpoints make the old assumptions harder to defend

This is where Edge AI changes the debate.

If a building only needs a limited number of connected points, wire may still feel manageable. If a building strategy starts calling for far denser sensing, more localized controls, and more distributed intelligence, the economics begin to shift.

A wiring model that looks acceptable for dozens of devices can become far more problematic for hundreds or thousands. Installation complexity grows. Retrofit disruption grows. Planning rigidity grows. The cost of adding intelligence rises with every endpoint.

That matters because Edge AI increases the value of broader sensing and denser deployment. The more practical it is to add endpoints, the more practical it becomes to push intelligence closer to the source, reduce false positives, act faster, and avoid sending every event upstream for cloud-side processing. This is not only a connectivity issue. It is an architecture issue.

Wireless becomes more strategic in an Edge AI world

Wireless in buildings should no longer be framed only as a convenience or retrofit workaround. In an Edge AI future, wireless becomes a more strategic part of the infrastructure model.

It can reduce installation friction. It can make broader sensing economically practical. It can support more flexible layouts as building usage changes. It can help make dense endpoint deployment more realistic in offices, campuses, hospitals, mixed-use buildings, industrial sites, and other environments where rewiring every new intelligent endpoint is difficult to justify.

This does not mean every building system should abandon wire. It does mean the old assumption that more intelligence should simply mean more cable deserves much closer scrutiny.

Europe is adding policy pressure to the same question

This infrastructure debate is not being shaped by technology alone. In Europe, regulation is also moving in a direction that favors smarter, more observable, and more controllable buildings. The revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which entered into force on 28 May 2024 and must be transposed into national law by 29 May 2026, introduces requirements for building automation and control in non-residential buildings and pushes further digitalisation of building information.  

The same policy direction also strengthens the role of building systems data. European Commission guidance on Article 16 says Member States should ensure direct access to building systems’ data by interested parties in order to support a competitive and innovative market for smart building services, and specifically notes access rights for owners, tenants, and managers.  

That matters because as buildings are expected to become more responsive, more data-aware, and more energy efficient, the question of how growing numbers of intelligent endpoints are connected becomes more important. Policy is not deciding the wire-versus-wireless question by itself, but it is clearly increasing the value of scalable, data-capable building infrastructure.  

This is where the connectivity discussion becomes more strategic

As Edge AI pushes more intelligence into distributed building endpoints, the underlying network has to scale differently. It has to be practical to deploy, efficient to operate, secure, and suitable for long-life infrastructure. That is where next-generation low-power wireless approaches such as NR+ become increasingly relevant.

NR+ is based on DECT-2020 NR, which ETSI states was approved by the ITU-R as an IMT-2020 5G technology. ETSI describes it as the world’s first non-cellular 5G technology, and Nordic similarly describes NR+ as a non-cellular radio standard included as part of the 5G standards by the ITU.

That matters because buildings are long-life assets. Infrastructure decisions made today need to remain credible over long deployment cycles. As endpoint counts rise and local intelligence becomes more valuable, the market will increasingly need connectivity options that are not only wireless, but also standards-based, scalable, low power, and designed for serious infrastructure use.

The bigger point is not wireless versus wire in isolation

The bigger point is that Edge AI changes what buildings will demand from connectivity.

The question is no longer just whether wireless can save installation cost. The more important question is whether wiring-heavy models remain the right default for a future in which buildings may contain far more intelligent, connected, and distributed edge devices than they do today.

For some systems, wire will continue to make sense. For many emerging layers of distributed building intelligence, the case for scalable low-power wireless will become harder to ignore.

The Infrastructure Question Is Changing

Smart buildings are entering a new phase. Edge AI is increasing the value of local intelligence and pushing more capability into distributed endpoints. That should force the industry to rethink a long-standing assumption: that adding more intelligence should naturally mean adding more wire.

In many cases, that model does not scale well enough.

It slows deployment, raises costs, limits endpoint density, and makes retrofits harder than they need to be. In doing so, it risks turning infrastructure into the bottleneck for smarter buildings.

For LM Semi, this is the real inflection point. The future is not just more connected buildings. It is more intelligent buildings, built on connectivity infrastructure that is practical enough to deploy at meaningful scale. In that world, low-power wireless and technologies such as NR+ are not side topics. They are becoming part of the main conversation.

Sources

ND00004