Episode 45: Vijay Sankaran

In this episode of the Titanium Economy Podcast, Akshay Sethi, President and Head of Commercial Excellence at Ayna, speaks with Vijay Sankaran, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Johnson Controls, about digitizing a company with more than 140 years of history. Sankaran explains why buildings have proven harder to digitize than other industries, how the OpenBlue platform delivers energy efficiency and predictive maintenance, and how it is evolving from dashboards into an agentic system. The conversation also covers Johnson Controls' fast-growing data center cooling business, enterprise data architecture, and cybersecurity for operational technology.

Vijay Sankaran is Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Johnson Controls, the global leader in smart, healthy, and sustainable buildings, with operations in more than 150 countries. He joined in 2021 as Chief Technology Officer, leading the OpenBlue digital platform, and since 2024 has held a broader digital and customer-facing mandate across innovation and development. He was previously CIO at TD Ameritrade and spent over a decade in senior technology roles at Ford. He holds a degree in mathematics and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, and serves on the board of Veralto Corporation.

Discussion Points

• Why Buildings Are Harder to Digitize: Five years in, Sankaran's biggest lesson is that buildings resist digitization more than automotive or healthcare, since one building can hold devices from 50 different OEMs and portfolios mix owned, leased, and third-party-run sites. Rather than trying to be all things to all people and they’ve focused on mission-critical and large real-estate customers.
• Where OpenBlue Delivers ROI: The value comes through in three areas: 10 to 20% annual energy savings from optimized cooling, predictive fault detection that catches problems before they escalate, and emissions tracking for requirements such as New York's Local Law 97. Making that possible also meant teaching a hardware workforce to think beyond individual units and understand the systems they operate within.
• Owning the Data Center Thermal Chain: Since acquiring Silent-Aire in 2021, Johnson Controls has built an end-to-end position in data center cooling, from air-cooled chillers to coolant units near the rack, adding a 2025 strategic investment in direct-to-chip specialist Accelsius for cold-plate cooling. Data centers are now its fastest-growing segment, spanning hyperscalers and new operators worldwide.
• From Dashboards to Agents: Next-generation OpenBlue shifts the platform from dashboards to an agentic system, using AI to curate and normalize building data, then running vertical agents starting with hospitals. The same pattern runs enterprise-wide, where a new AI workflow reads 300-page RFPs and auto-generates quotes across ERPs.
• Security, and Leaders vs Laggards: As OT systems grow more connected, Sankaran points to the 2022 Tempered Networks deal and its zero-trust overlay that cloaks and encrypts building devices to shrink the attack surface. Across his career, he argues the AI winners will redesign whole processes rather than bolt agents onto every step, backed by curated data and people who think differently

For More Information

Vijay Sankaran LinkedIn

Johnson Controls

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Ayna Website