A Home Full of Smart Devices Is Not Yet a Smart Home
From my experience with building systems, connecting two manufacturers' pipes can sometimes be easier than connecting their "smart" controls.
The boiler has an app. Ventilation has another. Lighting has a third. The homeowner can operate everything from a phone, but still has to make the parts work together.
The remote control moved to the smartphone. The integration work stayed with the human.
Complete automation systems exist. The harder challenge is an occupied apartment with mixed equipment, finished walls and a limited budget.
Saving energy should not require replacing every working device.
This is where I see a practical role for local AI: coordinating the home as a whole, remembering its history and checking whether interventions actually helped.
A room stays cold. Instead of simply raising the setpoint, the system could compare available measurements, check operating modes and recall recent maintenance. It could propose a correction, or make an already authorised adjustment, then verify the effect.
Memory would serve a practical purpose: which room warms slowly, which sensor proved unreliable, what changed during repairs, and why the occupants rejected a previous setting.
This is one practical role I want c to take within my c=a+b research: participation in the physical home through sensors and controllers, not merely advice from a screen.
We should build on existing standards and automation platforms, not invent another incompatible ecosystem. AI cannot reason a missing control interface into existence. Some problems still need a valve, a cable or a technician.
Equipment protections and manual controls must work independently of the AI. If it stops, the home must remain usable.
The economic test is equally concrete: energy, bills, comfort and air quality, after installation, maintenance and computing costs. Compare against well-configured conventional automation. A lower bill achieved by making people cold is not intelligence.
Europe has a strong reason to care. The European Commission estimates that 85% of EU buildings were built before 2000. The opportunity is not confined to new demonstration houses.
It is affordable, incremental coordination in millions of homes that already exist, without turning domestic life into a vendor-owned data stream.
This is another part of the local AI market still waiting to mature.
A smart home should not require its owner to become the unpaid system administrator of a collection of smart devices.