How Sajid Combines AI and Ambition to Transform Energy Efficiency at Scale

At Trane Technologies, we believe in a sustainable world made real through human ingenuity. As a global climate innovator, we are investors in tomorrow's possibilities — and the people who dare to create them. Climate innovation is not just our goal. It's how we operate.

Leaders like Sajid Khanpuri embody this spirit by building the technical infrastructure needed to deploy AI-enabled, cloud-based energy optimization at scale. Bold ideas, paired with the right culture and the right team, can turn ambitious goals into measurable results.

Where energy gets personal

Sajid Khanpuri is someone who likes big challenges — and his reasons for that run deeper than most. Growing up in Zambia, where most of his family still lives, Sajid witnessed firsthand what happens when a nation's growth outpaces its energy infrastructure. Power interruptions and load shedding were a fact of life, and they left a lasting impression.

"There was big expansion in the country," Sajid says. "However, the infrastructure of energy was not keeping up. And, to this day we still see ramifications of that."

For Sajid, energy efficiency was never just a concept — it was a lived experience. That conviction followed him when he relocated to Canada to study mechanical engineering at the University of Ottawa, and it stayed with him after he graduated in 2015. After a stint in medical manufacturing, he eventually landed at an HVAC controls company where he developed deep technical expertise in building automation systems, with an eye toward where he wanted to go next.

Big dreams meet real results

A tip from a friend in the HVAC industry led Sajid to BrainBox AI, a business within Trane Technologies specializing in AI-enabled energy optimization, and an interview quickly convinced him he'd found what he was looking for. Sajid joined in May 2021 as an onboarding engineer, drawn by the company's big ambitions and the way it thought beyond a single building to a set of built environments that could span an entire region, a country, even the globe.

"When I saw that they were leveraging AI, that's where my curiosity was piqued. Here was a company that wanted to impact the whole globe, and now had the technology to do it. I'd love to be part of that."

As BrainBox AI scaled, so did Sajid's role within it. What began as hands-on deployment work evolved into something larger — building and leading the Client Performance Services (CPS) team, a group dedicated to ensuring that deployed sites continue to perform and improve over time. In October 2025, he was named team manager, a reflection of both his technical expertise and his ability to lead through complexity. It's a role that has put him at the forefront of some of the most ambitious AI-enabled energy projects in the industry.

None has been more defining than the Dollar Tree project. Working within Trane Technologies' broader commitment to delivering scalable climate solutions, BrainBox AI leveraged Trane Autonomous Control technology to remotely integrate, control and optimize HVAC equipment across hundreds, then thousands of individual Dollar Tree stores. It was coordinated efficiency on a scale that had never been attempted before.

The challenge for Sajid's team was to keep HVAC units across a massive and rapidly growing portfolio performing at maximum efficiency. Starting with 616 sites and eventually scaling to nearly 3,000, every building presented its own set of variables — different layouts, different equipment, different conditions. Sajid's team built a monitoring system to track uptime and performance across all of them, ensuring the AI's decisions were continuously delivering the energy savings promised to the client.

"Our team's job, once the buildings were deployed, was to make sure they were not only performing but continuously improving," Sajid said. "The challenge was: how do we ensure that the AI's algorithm, the decisions it's making, are actually impacting the energy savings we're trying to extract?"

The result is an AI solution now managing 3,000 stores that has become the model for an entirely new approach to remote building management and optimization. To date, the project has delivered 7,980,916 kilowatt hours of energy savings, 5,632 tons of carbon emissions reduced and more than $1 million in cost savings. This is proof that for Sajid and his team, thinking big delivers real results.

The moment that made it real

When the first rounds of performance data came in and the results were presented to the Dollar Tree team, the numbers spoke for themselves. For Sajid, it was when the scale of what they had built truly sank in, and confirmation that the approach his team had developed could deliver at a level no one had attempted before. “It was the moment,” Sajid said, “that we were able to prove not only to our customers, but also to ourselves that we could take on these big challenges.”