2027 Speakers
Dan Leaf, President & CEO, GUGLI Corporation
Dan Leaf is the co-founder and CEO of GUGLI Corporation, a platform that monitors emergency responder radio communication systems and other mandated life safety and critical infrastructure. GUGLI's coverage runs from large commercial buildings to dams, nuclear plants, airports and manufacturing facilities, and the company operates globally. Dan came to the problem from the installation side, after nearly 20 years as an integrator. Over that career he built and sold two design-build firms, each of which started regional and grew into a national player. The second, Leaf Communications, reached roughly 200 people spanning drafters, engineers, operations staff and construction crews. Across both companies, his teams designed, installed and commissioned more than 5,000 in-building ERCES and Cellular systems. The work took him to job sites in market after market, and the same pattern kept surfacing. The industry had gotten very good at installing these systems and very bad at knowing whether they still worked. A building would pass its annual test, receive its certificate, and then go unwatched until the next test came around. Faults introduced by tenant improvements, equipment degradation, damaged cabling or a changed donor path sat undiscovered for months. In Dan's field experience, more than 40 percent of annual tests turn up something out of compliance that requires a change order and a retest, which means the failure was almost always present long before anyone found it. Nobody in the building knew, and nobody responding to the building knew either. He founded GUGLI to close that gap. The company builds intelligence into infrastructure so the systems people depend on can report their own condition continuously and tell the truth in real time. GUGLI holds itself to a simple standard: as little as 90 seconds from condition to notification, and no notification means the system is working. What began as an in-building problem proved to be the same problem anywhere mandated infrastructure is tested periodically and trusted continuously, and the platform now monitors assets at dams, nuclear plants, airports and manufacturing facilities across global markets, while supporting some of the largest metropolitan fire authorities in the United States. Dan is also active on the code side of the problem. He is advancing a revision to NFPA 1225 for the 2027 edition that would require continuous supervisory monitoring of in-building emergency responder communications enhancement systems. His proposal covers continuous monitoring, off premises transmission to a party with a duty to act, performance parameters that go beyond simple component state, and the acceptance record named as the benchmark against which current performance is judged. His argument is plain: fire alarm has had a central station for decades, and radio critical infrastructure deserves its own. He is also focused on what artificial intelligence makes possible in this category, in two directions. Predictive failure, using data across thousands of monitored assets to identify systems trending toward failure before they cross the line. And automated plan review, on the conviction that consistency and structured data are what let these systems actually meet the performance demands written into the code. Dan speaks regularly to audiences of building owners, developers, OEMs, integrators and authorities having jurisdiction. He is an Air Force veteran and served two years in the Middle East as a civilian. He lives in Southern California.