Katie Davis, Chief Technology Officer, Global Fire, Honeywell, tells FSJA about its plans to accelerate technology.
Innovation has never been associated with speed in the fire industry. Built on regulation, certification and life safety, change has traditionally been measured rather than rapid. But according to Honeywell, that is changing.
Sitting down with FSJA at the recent NFPA Conference in Las Vegas, Katie Davis, Chief Technology Officer, Global Fire, Honeywell, explained that for the company, innovation has accelerated dramatically over the past year, with new hardware, connected software platforms and data-driven technologies being developed at a pace rarely seen.
That acceleration is backed up by action. Over the past year, Honeywell has nearly doubled the number of development projects underway while maintaining a clear focus on solving real-world customer problems.
One of the latest examples is Honeywell’s new Smoke Control solution for the INSPIRE platform, developed specifically to simplify one of the most complex aspects of fire system installation.
In addition to fire response, the system includes a natively integrated “purge” function that automatically responds to carbon monoxide (CO) events by exhausting contaminated air from the affected zone while introducing fresh air to safely reduce CO concentration levels. This complements the system’s fire-mode operation, where airflow is managed to contain smoke and limit oxygen to a potential fire.
“Smoke control exists right throughout the industry. It’s relatively common. You use it in hospitals, hospitality and high-rise buildings. We wanted to go above and beyond with smoke control,” Davis tells FSJA.
“One of the biggest pieces of feedback we hear from customers is smoke control can be difficult to program. It can take a while when we go and set it up. We need flexibility because every building is different and every market is different.”
Rather than designing the product solely in the laboratory, Honeywell engineers worked directly alongside installers and customers to understand the challenges they face onsite.
“I spent some time in Los Angeles walking around with one of our customers going to several different buildings, understanding how they were going to connect the product and how it works. It became clear that it could be complicated and time-consuming.
“It was really important to create a product that allowed our customers to interface with it very well and for it to be very easily programmed.”
The development process became a genuine exercise in collaborative innovation, with customer feedback shaping the final product from the earliest prototypes.
“Working really closely with our customers hand in hand to say, ‘What is it that you truly wish you had that was better? And how can we help with that?’”
Listening to customers was only the first step. Honeywell’s engineering team then translated that feedback into measurable improvements that installers would notice immediately in the field.
“I literally sat and watched my engineering leader take a prototype unit after we’d visited several different buildings. The technician explained exactly what they needed to do and watched my engineering leader do it just like that on the fly. It took maybe five or 10 minutes to do exactly what the technician asked.
“So it reduced their time to program and install it by a significant amount.
“That was a big deal.”
Of course, the new Smoke Control solution, which is available across the Americas, is just one example of a much broader innovation programme now underway across Honeywell.
Increasingly, the company’s focus is shifting beyond individual devices towards connected platforms capable of delivering richer data, greater visibility and improved decision-making.
Much of that investment is centred on continuously updating Connected Life Safety Services (CLSS), its connected software ecosystem that enables real-time monitoring, compliance management, simplifying mandatory reporting and enhanced situational awareness for emergency responders.
“It’s really about providing that information,” Davis says. “CLSS gives us an opportunity to do that. We’re providing sensor data … CLSS can report that so a firefighter or first responder knows where the fire is propagating and how fast it’s propagating in a specific location.”
One of the latest additions to the CLSS platform is Rescue Assist, designed to improve emergency evacuation for occupants with disabilities by giving responders better visibility of where assistance is needed.
Davis says, “It’s a pretty cool product. It allows first responders to really understand where these individuals are located within the building and where they might need additional assistance in the event of a fire or emergency evacuation.”
Otherwise, she says it’s guesswork.
“If you know there’s a person on a certain floor that has a disability and needs to be evacuated, we can provide that information.”
For Davis, however, connected systems are only the beginning. The longer-term ambition is to fundamentally change the role of fire technology, from reacting to emergencies to anticipating them before they occur.
Historically, fire systems have detected incidents, sounded alarms and assisted evacuation. The next generation, she believes, will increasingly identify risks before an emergency develops.
“For us it’s about, can I tell you before it happens? Can I predict it based on data that I’m reading from a sensor?”
She points to Honeywell’s Li-ion Tamer technology, which can detect early signs of lithium-ion battery thermal events before a dangerous emission occurs.
“We know 30 minutes in advance before an emission of a lithium-ion battery. Can we take that concept and do that with other sensors in other locations? Is something heating up that we can sniff out, so to speak, and know there’s time to react before there is a loss of life or loss of property?”
Making that vision a reality depends on one thing above all else: data. This, says Davis, means collating as much data as possible is critical.
“You can use things like AI to drive some correlation and then say, ‘What does this mean? How do I read this analytical model to say what is happening or what is going to happen before an event takes place?’”
Today’s CLSS dashboards allow building owners to monitor compliance, identify faults and manage testing remotely. Looking ahead, Davis believes those connected systems will become increasingly intelligent, helping building owners identify potential issues before they become serious incidents.
That ambition also reflects a wider shift taking place inside Honeywell itself. While the fire industry has traditionally adopted new technologies cautiously, the company believes innovation and reliability can go hand in hand.
“The industry is really interesting because it’s not an industry that adopts technology fast. And I think for good reason because we’re talking about human life here.”
However, she believes that trusted products can still evolve and that philosophy is now reflected in the scale of its development programme.
“For Honeywell, we are double the number of projects in 2026 that we had in 2025 and executing them on time. This team is really about innovation and advancing fire life safety for the industry.”
If there is one clear message from Davis, it is that for Honeywell, innovation is not happening at the edges of the business. It’s becoming central to its future.
Trusted fire protection remains the foundation, but connected technologies, intelligent data and predictive capabilities are now driving a new era of innovation.
For Honeywell, the ambition is not simply to respond to fires more effectively, but to help prevent them before they happen by using technology to make buildings safer, smarter and more resilient.
