
Tim OKeeffe
Chief Executive Officer, Symmons Industries
Symmons Industries is a U.S.-based water management innovator with over 85 years of history in precision plumbing engineering. Founded in 1939, the company revolutionized the industry with the invention of the pressure-balancing shower valve and today serves global hospitality, multifamily, and commercial real estate brands like Marriott, Hilton, and Simon Malls. With more than 220 employees and over $100 million in revenue, Symmons remains committed to innovation—developing accessible, scalable, and intelligent water management systems. Its flagship IoT product, Evolution®, offers real-time monitoring and AI-powered automation to optimize water usage, prevent system failures, and support sustainable building operations across thousands of properties.
As Evolution® expanded across hundreds of properties, Symmons saw an opportunity to transform how facility teams responded to water usage anomalies. While the system generated millions of data points, the challenge was turning that raw telemetry into timely, actionable insights—without requiring manual review or specialized expertise. Traditional BMS tools weren’t built for real-time automation at scale, prompting Symmons to explore AI-powered solutions that could unlock greater efficiency, sustainability, and cost savings.
Symmons partnered with Caylent to design an AI-powered anomaly detection and insights engine that could scale across its IoT-based Evolution® platform. By leveraging machine learning for pattern recognition and Generative AI for contextual recommendations, the team transformed complex water usage data into real-time, actionable guidance. This empowers facility managers to proactively address issues without technical intervention.
Before this initiative, identifying leaks or inefficiencies required manual reviews, reactive maintenance, and often costly damage control. Today, Symmons' Evolution® platform uses AI to detect and classify anomalies in real time, proactively preventing failures and optimizing water usage across hundreds of sites. This shift from reactive to predictive management has not only reduced operational costs and accelerated response times but it will also enable customers to conserve millions of gallons of water annually—directly supporting ESG goals and advancing sustainability across the built environment.
Real-time detection: Reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) by over 1 hour per incident, cutting emergency response times significantly.
Leak mitigation: Detected and resolved 400+ leak incidents in the past year, preventing an estimated $5 million in water damage.
Water savings: Saved over 80 million gallons in 2024 alone across 74 high-usage properties; currently monitoring 1+ billion gallons annually.
Heating efficiency: Reduced hot water heating costs by 8–12% across hotels and multifamily buildings through AI-guided temperature optimization.
Future impact: Projected to save 5 billion gallons of water over the next five years.
Amazon SageMaker – Trains and continuously retrains time-series ML models using historical and live IoT sensor data for anomaly detection.
Amazon Bedrock & Nova – Powers Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for Generative AI, contextualizing sensor data with technical manuals, maintenance logs, and facility history.
AWS IoT Core – Collects and processes millions of real-time sensor readings (flow rates, temperature, humidity) from devices across hundreds of facilities.
AWS Lambda – Executes low-latency AI inference and orchestrates real-time responses between models, dashboards, and facility systems.
Amazon DynamoDB – Provides scalable, low-latency storage for structured data such as model metadata, anomaly classifications, and user interactions.
Amazon OpenSearch – Serves as a vector store to retrieve historical anomalies, AI responses, and contextually similar events using semantic search.
Amazon API Gateway – Manages secure API endpoints, enabling smooth communication across the AI stack and user interfaces.
LangChain – Facilitates orchestration between Generative AI models and the retrieval layer, allowing the AI copilot to surface property-specific recommendations.
Vector Databases (OpenSearch with Vector Search support) – Enables semantic retrieval of prior anomaly data, AI responses, and related documentation.
FastAPI – Powers the backend APIs for dashboard access and real-time AI model interaction within the Evolution® platform.
MLOps Pipeline (CI/CD) – Automates model versioning, testing, deployment, and rollback, ensuring high availability and continuous improvement.
Interactive Dashboards & Alerts (SMS, Email, App) – Provide real-time visualizations and notifications to facility managers, enabling immediate response to anomalies.
Symmons challenged the traditional building management status quo by replacing expensive, engineer-dependent systems with an AI-native, cost-effective platform that democratizes real-time water management. Implementing machine learning and Generative AI at scale required rethinking legacy processes, building robust MLOps pipelines, and training non-technical users to trust AI-guided insights. The result is a proactive, self-learning infrastructure that empowers facility teams to act before failures occur—saving millions of gallons of water and millions of dollars in damage. By making predictive maintenance and autonomous optimization accessible to mid-market and enterprise clients alike, Symmons is setting a new standard for intelligent building systems.
One shining moment was when Evolution® helped a hotel identify a continuous cooling tower overflow that had silently driven up costs. Addressing the issue led to $200,000 in annual savings, highlighting the tangible impact of combining data, automation, and human decision-making. This success demonstrated the power of real-time insight in preventing long-term inefficiencies and reinforced Symmons’ mission to drive both environmental and financial sustainability. It marked a turning point in building trust across stakeholders and accelerating platform adoption.
About Symmons Industries
Symmons Industries is a U.S.-based water management innovator with over 85 years of history in precision plumbing engineering. Founded in 1939, the company revolutionized the industry with the invention of the pressure-balancing shower valve and today serves global hospitality, multifamily, and commercial real estate brands like Marriott, Hilton, and Simon Malls. With more than 220 employees and over $100 million in revenue, Symmons remains committed to innovation—developing accessible, scalable, and intelligent water management systems. Its flagship IoT product, Evolution®, offers real-time monitoring and AI-powered automation to optimize water usage, prevent system failures, and support sustainable building operations across thousands of properties.