Key points:
- Successful campuses view operational efficiency as a foundation for long-term resilience, innovation, and growth
- Connected campuses: Modernizing communications for safety and simplicity
- Reimagining higher education through a human-centered digital lens
- For more on campus growth, visit eCN’s Campus Innovation hub
Colleges and universities are at an inflection point. As student expectations rise and competition for talent, research funding, and enrollment intensifies, campuses have a powerful opportunity to rethink how their physical environments support long‑term growth.
Forward-thinking institutions are increasingly viewing campus facilities as strategic assets rather than operational expenses. By using data and digital technologies to better understand how buildings perform, institutions can uncover inefficiencies and create environments that better support students, faculty, and research initiatives.
By investing in AI-powered smart building solutions, campuses can turn efficiency into a growth engine, reinvesting savings into their academic mission and updated infrastructure.
This shift is particularly timely. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Higher Education Trends report, an average of one college each week has announced a closure or merger since early 2024. With deferred maintenance backlogs expected to reach $750-$950 billion over the next decade, according to Moody’s, leaders are increasingly turning to digital solutions to modernize campuses, prioritize investments, and build lasting institutional resilience.
By collecting and analyzing data on everything from equipment performance to space utilization, facilities teams are finding new ways to prioritize repairs, prevent costly failures and make better use of existing resources.
Smarter buildings, stronger campuses
Already, sensors are quietly working behind the scenes, assessing occupancy, and tracking air quality, energy use and equipment health. This data flows into analytics platforms that help leaders balance student comfort and operational efficiency. Issues are flagged before they disrupt campus life, and decisions are backed by real-time insights.
The impact can be significant. Stanford University has used data-driven HVAC optimization in its central utility plant, connected to 155 campus buildings, to reduce annual energy costs by $500,000, proving that real-time insights can improve efficiency and free up capital to reinvest in growth.
On many campuses, data-driven building management helps facilities teams shift from reactive maintenance to more proactive operations. HVAC systems can adjust ventilation and temperature based on actual occupancy patterns, helping reduce energy waste while maintaining comfort. Predictive maintenance tools can identify equipment issues before they become disruptive failures. Centralized dashboards can help leaders visualize energy and water consumption across multiple facilities, making it easier to prioritize investments and target efficiency improvements.
For institutions facing staffing shortages and aging infrastructure, these capabilities can provide greater visibility into campus operations while helping limited resources go further.
When paired with modern building automation systems, these technologies can also support highly specialized environments such as research laboratories, where maintaining consistent temperature, humidity, and pressure conditions is critical.
Here are four ways higher education institutions are using smart building technologies to improve efficiency, support decarbonization goals, and strengthen long-term resilience.
- Advancing decarbonization while reducing operating costs
- AI-driven optimization tools continuously evaluate occupancy patterns, weather conditions, and energy demand to reduce energy use, lower associated emissions, and adjust temperature, air quality, and humidity. This goes beyond traditional automation, because AI processes massive amounts of data to uncover deeper efficiency opportunities that human operators or rule-based systems might struggle to catch.
- Data-driven insights help facilities teams identify underperforming equipment and inefficient energy use, allowing them to prioritize upgrades that reduce waste, lower emissions, and improve building performance. These insights are only possible when using AI to aggregate and analyze the data that large campuses generate. The right tools can process both structured and unstructured data across vendors and legacy equipment for maximum impact.
- Energy cost savings can be redirected toward high-value priorities such as academic programs, research initiatives, scholarships, and campus modernization projects.
- Extending the life of campus assets and reducing downtime
- Predictive analytics guide facilities teams to the highest-impact interventions, reducing emergency repairs and stretching capital renewal budgets. Studies show predictive maintenance can cut unplanned downtime by up to 50 percent and unplanned service calls by 32 percent, significantly reducing the emergency repairs that strain budgets and disrupt operations.
- With higher education facilities teams facing ongoing workforce shortages and maintenance staff now responsible for nearly 25 percent more square footage per worker than in 2007, smart scheduling ensures limited personnel focus on the highest-value tasks. Reducing deferred maintenance costs opens resources for new facilities or academic initiatives. Avoiding emergency repairs and making capital renewal budgets go further also helps institutions protect endowment resources and ensure they’re used for their intended purposes.
- Predictive maintenance and real-time monitoring prevent equipment downtime – especially important in critical environments like research labs, where climate control is key to advancing cutting-edge breakthroughs, ensuring compliance and supporting grant-funded work.
- Advancing decarbonization as a strategic priority
- Higher education institutions increasingly recognize that decarbonization can deliver both environmental and operational benefits. Initiatives that reduce carbon emissions often decrease waste, lower costs, and improve efficiency. These efforts can also support institutional reputation and help meet growing expectations from students, faculty, and other stakeholders.
- Smart systems provide the data transparency needed to track emissions and verify progress toward decarbonization goals. Smart building platforms help quantify these gains, turning emission reductions into a measurable driver of institutional performance.
- Enhancing the campus experience
- Smart building systems help optimize indoor air quality, lighting, and thermal comfort while maintaining the strict safety and ventilation standards required across classrooms, labs, and research spaces. These systems continuously adjust conditions based on occupancy, equipment use and real-time sensor data to systems to create healthier, more stable environments.
- Improved comfort and reliability contribute to a better campus experience. When students learn and collaborate in spaces that feel safe, modern, and well-maintained, it supports overall satisfaction and academic performance. Over time, these enhanced environments can strengthen recruitment, retention, and enrollment by reinforcing the institution’s commitment to student success.
From efficiency to institutional resilience
Colleges and universities face growing pressure to balance rising expectations with aging infrastructure, constrained budgets, and evolving operational demands.
Smart building technologies are helping institutions move beyond simply maintaining facilities. By providing greater visibility into how campuses operate, these solutions can help leaders make more informed decisions, maximize existing resources, and better align operational investments with campus priorities.
Ultimately, the most successful campuses will be those that view operational efficiency as a foundation for long-term resilience, innovation, and growth. By turning data into actionable insight, institutions can redirect resources toward the initiatives that matter most: supporting students, advancing research, and strengthening their mission for the future.
Jamie Cameron is VP of OpenBlue at Johnson Controls.
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