These Companies Claim They Can End Office Air-Conditioning Wars

It's one of those summer days when the air feels like water and smells like garbage and the commute to-and-from work requires an additional shower. Sure, the misery of a hot summer day can't be completely eliminated, but what if office temperature wasn't an additional concern? What if your eight hours working inside were perfectly temperate, neither an over-air-conditioned tundra nor a sweaty reminder of the hellscape that awaits outside?

That's the utopic reality for the 700 people who work in AppNexus's New York City offices. The startup uses Comfy, an app that lets the people, rather than the maintenance crew, dictate office climate. Comfy's software connects to an office's existing heating and cooling systems, allowing people to control ambient temperature while learning the habits and preferences of users to regulate the climate of a given space. Workers using Comfy have three options: warm my space, cool my space, or I’m comfy. If they opt for cooling, they get 10 minutes of air conditioning. Those after a heat boost get 10 minutes of warmer air. Preliminary data from one study of an office building using Comfy found that 83 percent of the app's users were "more" to "much more" satisfied than before.