LEED is the most widely recognised green building certification in the world. More than 195,000 projects across 186 countries carry a LEED rating, and for many institutional owners, developers, and corporate occupiers, it has become a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
But earning and maintaining LEED certification has always involved a problem the standard itself doesn’t solve: data.
What LEED Actually Measures
LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — is a points-based rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Buildings earn credits across categories including energy performance, water efficiency, indoor environment quality, and operations and maintenance practices. Credits accumulate into a score that determines certification level: Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum.
The pathway most relevant to existing buildings is LEED O+M: Operations and Maintenance. Unlike certifications tied to design or construction, LEED O+M is based on how a building actually performs over time — requiring ongoing data collection, a defined performance period, and recertification on a recurring cycle.
That ongoing requirement is where most buildings run into difficulty.
The Data Problem at the Centre of LEED O+M
Most modern buildings generate the data LEED requires continuously — through energy meters, IoT sensors, building management systems, and maintenance platforms. The problem is that this data lives in disconnected systems, formatted differently, managed by different teams, and rarely structured for certification review.
The traditional path to certification runs through a consultant who manually extracts, reconciles, and submits data to Arc — the USGBC’s performance management platform used to calculate LEED scores. For a single building this is a significant effort. For a portfolio it scales poorly. And because LEED O+M requires recertification on a recurring cycle, that effort repeats.
The result is that most buildings treat LEED as an episodic project: a concentrated push every few years, with performance gaps going undetected until the next review cycle begins.
How Akila Fits Into the Certification Process
Akila is a digital twin and operational intelligence platform. It connects to a building’s existing systems and creates a unified operational data layer across the portfolio — already doing the work of monitoring building performance in real time.
The Arc integration makes that data certification-ready automatically. Performance data collected through Akila pushes directly to a building’s Arc project, contributing toward the credits that determine its LEED score. Rather than a periodic extraction exercise, certification evidence accumulates continuously as the building operates.
For facility teams, this removes a layer of compliance overhead that has historically sat outside normal operations. For consultants, it means connecting to a data foundation that is already current and structured — freeing them to focus on optimisation and credit strategy rather than data preparation.
The Operational Impact
When performance data reaches Arc automatically, a building’s compliance status is always current. Gaps become visible in real time rather than at audit. Recertification — which under the traditional model means assembling months of historical data from scratch — becomes a review of a continuously maintained record.
At portfolio scale, the economics shift meaningfully. Each building added operates from the same data foundation. The marginal cost of bringing a new site into compliance drops, and portfolio-wide visibility into certification status becomes operationally manageable.
Akila’s Arc integration is currently live across three sites in Singapore, supporting a LEED O+M v4 recertification program for a major logistics and supply chain operator. Performance data and indoor environment quality coverage have been shipping to Arc since early 2026, covering credits across energy, indoor environment, and operations.
The Direction of Travel
LEED v5 — currently in development — is expected to make Arc a mandatory component of the certification process. Buildings and portfolios that establish automated, Arc-connected data workflows now are building infrastructure that the standard will require.
For operations teams managing certification across a portfolio without scaling headcount proportionally, the case for building that foundation ahead of the mandate is straightforward.
LEED was designed to recognise buildings that perform well. Akila’s position is that certification should be a natural output of good operational data practice — not a compliance project layered on top of it. If a building is being monitored properly, its performance data should be continuously available, structured, and ready for review.
Certification that requires a concentrated effort every few years is a cost. Certification that emerges from how a building is already run is a capability.
