India, Sept. 9 -- For years, Made in India meant something specific in the technology conversation. It meant assembly, not architecture. It meant we built what others designed. That story is changing, and it is changing fastest in the places that get the least attention: The physical infrastructure that quietly runs our cities.

I build one piece of that infrastructure. My work sits inside what I think of as the nervous system of the built environment, the systems that decide how a building senses, responds and adapts. When we started, the solutions available in this space were rudimentary - wired controls, manual configuration, systems that had to be told what to do rather than systems that understood the building they lived in. We looke...