Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments

About Café Zai: Intelligence for Informed Environments

Café Zai is a short podcast where urgent conversations meet real action. Hosted by architect and systems thinker Kimon Onuma, FAIA, each episode brings together doers and disruptors from architecture, digital twins, BIM, GIS, AI, semantics, and beyond, all sitting at the same virtual table. No slides. No scripts. Just sharp dialogue and real work behind the scenes. From digital twins to standards to resilience, we connect the dots. You’re invited to listen in, and when you’re ready, pull up a chair. This is Café Zai.

Publisher

Kimon

Category

technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Jul 2025

Latest episode

7 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

32 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Jul 2026

   Who Should AI Trust? Connecting Decentralized Trust and Smart Buildings

   Who should AI trust? Earlier this year, I met Drummond Reed (https://www.linkedin.com/in/drummondreed/) at the KWAAI (https://www.kwaai.ai/) conference at Scale 23x (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/23x), where he was presenting on decentralized trust. I asked him a question: Could decentralized trust apply to buildings? It wasn’t a use case he had been thinking about. As we talked through people, devices, AI agents, building systems, first responders, owners, operators, and digital twins, something clicked. Buildings need decentralized trust, too. That conversation led to Drummond joining our USGBC webinar (https://usgbc.cventevents.com/event/advancing-existing-building-performance-ai-series/schedule)on Ensuring Trust in AI for Building Operations, and continued in this latest Café Zai discussion. A building is not just a collection of equipment. It is a trust community. People, devices, AI agents, utilities, digital twins, and emergency responders all interact continuously—but they should not all have the same authority, permissions, or level of trust. As AI becomes part of building operations, the challenge isn’t simply making buildings smarter. It’s establishing trusted relationships between people, devices, agents, and buildings, relationships that can be verified, governed, and scaled. Thank you, Drummond, for bringing the Trust-over-IP perspective to the built environment.

2. 

   20 Mar 2026

   29 Are We Owners or Renters of Our Intelligence?

   You are currently renting your own intelligence. And Big Tech is making you pay for the privilege. Every time you use a centralized AI, your data is vacuumed up by a few giants, accelerating a dangerous consolidation of power. But there is an even bigger physical threat: energy. If Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) requires centralizing computing in massive server farms, it will concentrate massive energy demand in just a few locations. As AI pioneer Dr. Ben Goertzel warns, this creates a nasty synergy that will turn the AI race into an energy conflict. Decentralized, open infrastructure is the key to safely distributing both our intelligence and our power consumption. Many people don't realize there is a realistic solution to balance the scales: truly open, decentralized AI. In my latest Cafe Zai interview with Reza Rassool, Founder and Chair of Kwaai, he noted that while companies like OpenAI call themselves open, they should probably be called "ClosedAI" since they rarely release anything truly open anymore. To fight this, Kwaai's 1,000-person volunteer "Rebel Alliance" is building a decentralized, open-source AI infrastructure so we can finally be the owners, not the renters, of our own intelligence. For those of us in the built environment, this is how we protect our physical infrastructure from being held hostage by "AI landlords."

3. 

   16 Mar 2026

   28-The $20 Million Legal Dispute That Changed Construction's Daily Report

   A lack of documentation almost cost Peter Lasensky, founder of Command Post, $20 million. His response? He invented a simple, contemporaneous documentation tool using a Nextel walkie-talkie in 2001. Hear his 30-year journey from being one of San Diego's largest builders to creating Command Post Rev Ops and the Daily Report App—tools that manage the business of construction and have helped customers resolve claims up to $20 million. Discover how his "minimum viable product" evolved from human transcribers to full automation.

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.