As we head into the final weeks of 2025, we’re already looking ahead to next year. Specifically, we’ve been looking at the energy management software landscape, understanding what companies will need most from their software solutions, and where software trends are heading—both overall and here at Gazebo™ HQ.
With California’s two landmark climate reporting bills going into effect next year, consumers continuing to face energy price volatility, and companies looking to scale solutions across their sites, there are many forces at play that will affect the energy software landscape in the year ahead.
Here are four of the top energy management software trends we expect to see in 2026:
As businesses increasingly understand energy use as not just a static sustainability metric but rather as a malleable factor in their operations budgets and Scope 1 & 2 emissions calculations, software will respond. Businesses want their software to help prove that their energy management efforts are having the impact they intend. In the past, project tracking tools in energy management platforms focused on logging that energy efficiency projects were completed. Looking ahead, software tools will shift toward not just cataloging projects, but validating their impact.
With Gazebo, we are on the front end of this innovation curve. Gazebo was designed for strategic energy management (SEM) programs that are evaluated not only on completed projects but on the energy savings they deliver. Because of that, tying actions to results has always been one of Gazebo’s primary goals. Project lists in Gazebo are tied to performance dashboards that help visualize the energy and emissions impact of each project over time.
Gazebo also takes tracking impact a step further. Once projects are completed, Gazebo helps track energy best practices and standard operating conditions. It stands as a system of record for not just what, but when, where, and how a site saved energy, and it provides the tools to ensure that savings stick.
We have already started to see a shift in energy management software toward tools that combine both energy and carbon management into one platform, and this trend will continue and grow in the future. Companies are facing increased regulatory and customer-driven pressure to turn high-level climate targets into clear, measurable impacts, and are looking to tie site-level decarbonization efforts to those high-level goals. Because energy use often makes up a significant percent of an individual site’s emissions, understanding both the energy and carbon impact of an energy efficiency measure is vital to these efforts.
Seeing the emissions impact of energy efficiency projects helps get project buy-in from sustainability managers, and operations staff are motivated to incorporate these efforts into their day-to-day for the systems optimization and cost-savings impact of energy efficiency. Understanding the emissions impact of energy efficiency projects also helps prioritize projects based on the impact they’ll have on climate targets.
One of our goals with Gazebo is to facilitate the connection between single-site energy optimization and corporate-level financial and sustainability goals. Whether its energy, cost, or emissions data, Gazebo helps make the connection between operations staff and sustainability leaders by providing the metrics that each team cares about most.
Businesses are not only working to tie their corporate climate targets to site-level operations but also to scale site-level solutions across their portfolio, including their software solutions. In 2026, we expect to see software solutions invest in methods to easily integrate with companies’ existing systems and modular functionality that can scale across asset types. Research shows companies prioritize software that is easy to deploy across their sites, including effective onboarding processes, rather than software based on features alone.
You can send data from an existing building management system (BMS) as well as from IoT and metering devices to Gazebo to optimize your energy management efforts and streamline processes. For our customers that use Gazebo across multiple sites, Gazebo helps them manage portfolio-wide initiatives, track which sites are under- or over-performing, and help focus resources where they’re needed most.
In the last year alone, artificial intelligence (AI) has proliferated almost every industry on a scale we hadn’t seen before. That includes the energy management software industry, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t include AI and machine learning (ML) functionalities as a software trend we expect to continue in 2026. New innovations will look to incorporate AI analytics into energy software, including for energy use and emissions forecasting capabilities, anomaly detection in utility bills, and ML-powered fault detection and diagnostics for site operations, among others.
While we can’t share too much yet, we’re excited about a variety of ideas we’re exploring within Gazebo to safely and securely integrate AI for existing users and to support our SEM programs in recruiting new customers.
It’s been an awesome year here at Gazebo HQ. If you’re curious about the new features we rolled out this year, you can see a full list on our website.
As we look ahead to 2026, it’s exciting to see where the market is heading. Our mission is to help our customers and fellow implementers achieve more energy savings, lower emissions, and build a cleaner environment for all, and we’re always working to build software that supports those needs.
Questions for us? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us to learn more about Gazebo today.
