I was in Verona at FINCONNECT 2026. The BMS industry just changed.
I went to FIN Connect 2026 in Verona to represent INNON alongside my co-founder, Radu Petrescu. I expected a good conference. I didn't expect to come home thinking differently about what the next five years look like for every engineer we work with.
Here's what happened, and why I think it matters for you.
The broken chain nobody talks about
The BMS industry has a structural problem. Everyone in the chain — the BMS engineer, the M&E contractor, the building owner, the FM company — is focused entirely on their own part. The engineer delivers a system. The M&E signs it off. The building owner gets a folder of PDFs at practical completion and assumes everything is fine.
Nobody owns the whole chain. And so the building suffers quietly for years.
The temperature is 3°C off. Nobody knows. The energy bill is above the benchmark. Nobody traces it back. The FM company gets the 3 am calls and logs the same fault for the third year in a row. Nobody upstream is incentivised to fix it.
This is the industry we've been working in. And it's the reason INNON exists.
What I saw in Verona
@J2 Innovations unveiled FINtelligence at FIN Connect 2026. And for the first time, I've seen someone in this industry build a product that considers the entire chain at once.
Three things stood out:
1. The AI assistant for building owners. A building owner can now talk to their building in plain language. "Why is my energy bill up this month?" "Why is the third floor always too warm on Mondays?" The building answers. Not a report. Not a dashboard that nobody checks. A conversation.
This changes the relationship between building owners and their BMS engineers overnight. Owners who understand their building ask better questions. Better questions mean better briefs. Better briefs mean better systems.
2. The AI strategy builder for system integrators. Engineers can now build a complete BMS strategy in a fraction of the time it used to take — without sacrificing quality. The AI understands building logic. It works with the engineer, not instead of them. The result is a system that's been properly thought through, delivered efficiently, and confidently owned.
The engineers I spoke to at the conference weren't threatened by this. They were excited. Because it frees them to focus on what they're actually good at — understanding the building, solving the problem, and building the relationship with the client.
3. The thinking behind it. I spoke to the developers. What struck me wasn't just what they'd built — it was how clearly they understood the problem they were solving. They hadn't built an AI tool and looked for a use case. They'd mapped the broken chain in BMS and engineered something that addresses every broken link in it.
The community in that room felt it. The energy was different to any BMS conference I've attended. These were engineers who were ready.
Why this matters for INNON partners specifically
INNON is the only distributor operating fully inside both the Niagara and FIN ecosystems. Niagara and FIN are genuinely different platforms with different strengths — we're not here to say one is better than the other. What we can say is that we understand both, work with both, and can help you think clearly about which one is right for which building.
FINtelligence doesn't replace the system integrator. It enables them. The engineer who understands this technology early on will be able to offer their clients something nobody else on the tender list can.
That's the Ready for Anything position. Not the cheapest quote. Not the fastest turnaround. The engineer who asked the right question before anyone else did.
The conversation we want to have
If you're a strategic INNON partner and you're speccing a project right now — or thinking about the next one — I want to talk to you about what FINtelligence could mean for that project.
A genuine conversation about where your work is going and whether there's a smarter way to approach it.
Book a Solution Consultation, and we'll think about it together.