OpenSpace CEO Jeevan Kalanithi published a Forbes Technology Council article making the case that AI is ready to move beyond screens and documents into the physical environments where real work happens. The piece argues that while AI has mastered digital information, the physical world remains largely invisible to it: construction sites change daily, equipment moves, and much of what happens on a jobsite never makes it into a database. Kalanithi lays out what industries need to bridge that gap: capturing reality visually, contextualizing it spatially, and connecting it to the systems where decisions get made.
Being published in Forbes Technology Council puts this thinking in front of the CTOs, CIOs, and technology executives who make platform decisions for major industrial companies. The argument Kalanithi makes is a natural extension of what OpenSpace has been building since its founding: a platform that can turn a walk through a construction site into a structured, intelligent record of what actually happened. The article frames this as a broader industry shift, and it is, but it is also a precise description of what OpenSpace already does. The spatial AI systems that power OpenSpace connect visual reality to plans, schedules, and operational data so AI agents can answer questions that text-based systems cannot: Has this work been completed? Does what is installed match the plan? What changed since the last visit?
The four foundations Kalanithi outlines in the article are worth reading as a maturity model for any organization thinking seriously about AI: reality data, context, interoperability, and human oversight. For construction teams, those foundations are already embedded in how OpenSpace works. The platform is built to capture reality continuously and at scale, tie every image to a precise location and timestamp, and surface the information AI needs to do something useful with it. The article closes with a framing that captures what the next era of AI actually means: not just reading information, but understanding the world. That is the problem OpenSpace exists to solve. Learn more at openspace.ai.
By: Jeevan Kalanithi
