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Symmons Transforms Water Management & Conservation with AI and Machine Learning
Generative AI
Artificial Intelligence & MLOps
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Symmons® partnered with Caylent to integrate AI-driven anomaly detection and Generative AI into its Evolution® platform, enabling automated detection and proactive management of water usage issues. Facility teams gain clear, actionable insights—helping businesses conserve millions of gallons of water, reduce operational expenses by tens of thousands annually per property, and significantly enhance system efficiency and sustainability across hospitality, commercial, and multifamily properties.
"We’re laying the groundwork for self-healing infrastructure. By combining real-time IoT monitoring with AI-driven automation, our goal is to create a future where water management systems detect, diagnose, and resolve inefficiencies. Working with Caylent has been instrumental in achieving this vision—their expertise in MLOps, AI deployment, and scalable cloud solutions has enabled us to build an adaptive, future-proof platform that continuously improves while simplifying facility management."
Anthony Cipolla
Director of Product, Evolution IoT Building Management
→ AI-powered anomaly detection identifies abnormal water usage patterns, leaks, and inefficiencies in real-time.
→ ML-driven predictive maintenance detects potential failures before they escalate, reducing downtime, emergency repairs, and overall maintenance costs.
→ Scalable MLOps infrastructure ensures continuous model retraining, optimizing detection precision over time.
→ Generative AI contextualizes insights, providing automated troubleshooting recommendations based on historical data and maintenance manuals, minimizing reliance on specialized personnel.
→ Cloud-based architecture leveraging Amazon SageMaker AI, Bedrock, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, and OpenSearch ensures scalable, high-performance data processing and real-time AI model deployment.
→ Projected to save 5 billion gallons of water over the next five years, directly supporting ESG, sustainability, and LEED-aligned environmental goals.
→ Currently monitoring over 1 billion gallons of water annually, already saving over 80 million gallons in 2024 alone across 74 high-usage sites.
→ Identified and resolved 400+ leak incidents in the past year, preventing an estimated $5 million in water damage.
→ Hotels and multifamily facilities experienced 8–12% reductions in water heating costs by adjusting temperatures based on AI guidance.
→ Enabling faster response times, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by over an hour per incident compared to traditional methods & saving $10k+ per incident through reduced emergency labor, contractor costs, and guest reimbursements.
→ Proactive maintenance at scale, with predictive recommendations across hundreds of properties, each proactive action saving an average of $10k+ by preventing full system failures.
→ Established the foundation for self-healing building infrastructure, enabling future autonomous, AI-guided system adjustments, further increasing operational efficiency and decreasing human intervention.
Reliable water systems are easy to take for granted—until a malfunction leaves businesses scrambling to fix costly damage and disruptions. Leaks and undetected plumbing failures waste millions of gallons of water each year, driving up expenses and harming the environment. These issues can escalate over time, damaging critical infrastructure and resulting in repair costs that can scale up to millions of dollars.
Traditional Building Management Systems (BMS) have long been the gold standard for monitoring building operations, but their limitations are becoming increasingly apparent. Not only do these systems come with prohibitive costs ($500K+ upfront), but they also require specialized engineers to manually interpret data—a process that is both time-consuming and inefficient. As a result, most facilities lack real-time anomaly detection, relying instead on reactive maintenance that allows leaks, inefficiencies, and system failures to persist unnoticed.
Symmons is changing this dynamic by making cutting-edge water management solutions accessible to a broader market. By leveraging IoT and AI-driven automation, Symmons can bring affordable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy water conservation tools to hospitality, commercial real estate, and multifamily housing markets.
For over 85 years, Symmons has been at the forefront of water management innovation, blending precision engineering with cutting-edge technology. Founded in 1939 by Paul Symmons, the company revolutionized the plumbing industry with the invention of the pressure-balancing shower valve, a groundbreaking design that remains the industry benchmark.
Today, Symmons continues to push the boundaries of innovation, integrating technology to optimize water conservation across multifamily housing, hospitality, and commercial real estate. With 220+ employees and $100M+ in revenue, the company manufactures its products in the U.S. and serves global brands like Bellagio, Marriott, Hilton, and Simon Malls.
In 2019, it entered the IoT space with Evolution®, a smart water management system that delivers real-time insights into water usage, leaks, and temperature, enabling proactive facility management. Recognizing an opportunity to enhance insights and accelerate response times, the company partnered with Caylent to integrate AI-powered automation and Generative AI capabilities into its platform.
The Evolution® Building Management System provides granular insights into water usage trends. However, for many customers, this translates into millions of data points streaming in from hundreds or even thousands of properties. Without the right tools, interpreting this vast amount of information and turning it into meaningful actions can be time-consuming and complex. Left unaddressed, inefficiencies and leaks persist, compounding over time and driving up costs. Transforming this data into clear, actionable insights is key to maximizing the impact of Symmons' platform.
To bridge this gap, Symmons partnered with Caylent and AWS to integrate ML-driven anomaly detection and Generative AI-powered insights, making real-time water monitoring more intelligent and proactive. By leveraging AI models trained on historical trends and system documentation, Symmons' platform can pinpoint anomalous water usage patterns and suggest tailored solutions to facility managers in real-time.
By continuously learning from live data, the system improves detection accuracy over time, ensuring ongoing enhancements in water conservation and operational efficiency. With this AI-powered approach, Symmons is transforming raw data into immediate action, helping businesses save water, reduce costs, and operate more sustainably.
The Evolution® Building Management System has already demonstrated significant impact, helping commercial properties and hotels detect inefficiencies, reduce water waste, and lower costs through real-time IoT monitoring. In 2024 alone, the platform helped customers save over 80 million gallons of water across just 74 high-usage sites—part of a larger effort to monitor over 1 billion gallons of water annually across the portfolio. Symmons has set a bold target of saving customers 5 billion gallons of water over the next five years.
Across the board, Evolution has delivered tangible cost savings by detecting inefficiencies, leaks, and usage anomalies early, before they escalate into costly problems. One hotel saved $200,000 annually by identifying continuous cooling tower overflow, while another reduced insurance premiums by $50,000 after implementing leak detection safeguards during construction. These types of interventions aren’t outliers: customers have saved thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per year by catching issues like stuck irrigation valves, cooling tower drift, and underground leaks that would otherwise go unnoticed. At a major retail center, a broken float switch alone was wasting nearly 3 million gallons per year and has now been fully remediated.
The system has also proven effective in improving response times and operational efficiency. By providing real-time insights and prescriptive recommendations, Evolution has reduced mean time to resolution by over an hour in hospitality use cases, giving facility engineers time back and preventing service disruptions.
Evolution is already helping customers take proactive action across hundreds of properties. On average, each incident prevented upwards of $10,000 in guest reimbursements, emergency labor, and brand damage. The platform has identified and helped resolve over 400 leak incidents and flagged 500+ sustained scalding conditions—two areas that directly impact building integrity and occupant safety.
Beyond leak detection, Evolution supports sustainable energy management through intelligent water heating optimization. Hotels and multifamily buildings have reduced hot water heating costs by 8–12% simply by adjusting temperature setpoints based on AI recommendations. Another high-rise building cut overnight reheat coil temperatures to save $5,000 per year in energy waste. These insights not only reduce utility bills but also help customers meet energy conservation and carbon reduction goals.
Looking ahead, Symmons has ambitious goals for the Evolution® platform. In the near term, automated anomaly detection will become even more precise, with self-learning models reducing false alerts and prioritizing critical issues. AI-powered data contextualization will help facility teams understand the root causes of anomalies faster, while predictive maintenance models will forecast potential infrastructure failures—allowing teams to take preventative action before issues escalate.
Longer term, future enhancements will enable real-time system adjustments, where AI dynamically manages systems to maximize efficiency without human intervention. As these models advance, Evolution® is progressing toward true self-healing infrastructure: systems that detect, diagnose, and autonomously correct inefficiencies in real time. The result? Smarter, more resilient buildings with minimal operational overhead.
Symmons needed an ML-powered anomaly detection system that could automatically detect, classify, and contextualize water inefficiencies while integrating into its existing Evolution® platform. A robust MLOps framework was also necessary to continuously retrain models, deploy updates seamlessly, and scale across thousands of properties. Additionally, Generative AI-powered insights were required to help non-expert facility managers quickly diagnose issues, receive prescriptive recommendations, and take corrective actions without needing deep technical expertise. A low-latency cloud-architecture leveraging AWS services was key for real-time data processing, searchability, and AI-driven decision-making at scale.
Caylent designed a scalable, flexible, and future-proof anomaly detection and AI-powered monitoring system tailored to Symmons’ needs. The solution integrated IoT sensors, AI-powered analytics, and cloud automation, making real-time monitoring accessible, actionable, and continuously improving over time.
The foundation of the solution is a machine learning-based anomaly detection system designed to identify abnormal water usage patterns, leaks, and inefficiencies with minimal false positives. This involved:
To ensure continuous model improvements, versioning, and deployment at scale, an MLOps pipeline was built using AWS SageMaker, Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. This enables:
One of the most transformative features of the solution is Generative AI-driven contextualization, which bridges the gap between data insights and human decision-making. This is achieved through:
To bridge AI-powered insights with human decision-making, the Evolution® facility dashboard provides real-time data visualization and alerts. Facility teams receive instant notifications via SMS, email, and mobile apps, ensuring critical anomalies are addressed immediately. Interactive dashboards allow managers to analyze efficiency trends, track cost savings, and benchmark performance across multiple properties. The AI also generates predictive maintenance schedules, allowing teams to plan repairs proactively rather than responding to failures.
The system was built using AWS-native services that allow for real-time streaming, high-availability AI processing, and enterprise-grade security:
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Company
Established in Boston in 1939, Symmons invented the world’s first anti-scald, pressure- balancing shower valve. In 1968, Symmons released the Temptrol® shower valve, made entirely of brass, bronze, and stainless steel and manufactured right in Massachusetts. Today, Temptrol is widely considered the benchmark for pressure-balancing shower valves. The Symmons legacy of innovation continues with the Evolution® Building Management System. Evolution’s network of wireless, non-invasive sensors for temperature, humidity, flow, metering, and leaks can be self-installed in less than two hours. Evolution’s sensors deliver real- time AI-assisted data to the Evolution Dashboard, which can alert staff 24/7 via text, email, or phone. The Symmons corporate offices, manufacturing facility, and Customer Service team are proudly based in Braintree, Massachusetts. The company manufactures durable and reliable plumbing products for residential, commercial, hospitality, and institutional installations, all backed by the industry’s best warranty
Location
Braintree, MA
Industry
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