Eddie Cheng, co-founder and chief technology officer of Origen, says DOMIA is built to anticipate residents’ needs rather than simply respond to their commands.
Dubai — Luxury real estate in Abu Dhabi is booming, but according to Eddie Cheng, co-founder and chief technology officer of Origen, marble and views have a ceiling that intelligence does not. Origen’s generative living platform, DOMIA, aims to move smart homes beyond reactive commands towards a system that anticipates residents’ needs, from granting guest access ahead of arrival to winding a home down for sleep before anyone feels tired. Cheng argues that trust in such a system comes from architecture rather than policy: sensors that detect presence and movement without cameras, and data that stays on local hardware rather than in the cloud. Below, he discusses how this approach could scale from individual homes to intelligent, AI-native communities, and why Abu Dhabi is positioned to lead that shift.
Interview Excerpts
What makes a generative living platform fundamentally different from today’s smart home systems, and why do you believe it represents the future of luxury living? Today’s smart home is reactive. You issue a command, it obeys: a remote control with extra steps that places the entire burden of intelligence on you. A generative living platform, DOMIA, inverts that. It understands multi-round requests, remembers your preferences, and acts before being asked: generating temporary guest access before they arrive; winding the house down for sleep before you feel tired, on the rhythm it has learned; and alerting you to a stranger lingering outside before you’d think to check. Electricity took nearly 100 years to reach every home; broadband around 30. From the LLM to a Jarvis in every home will take under ten.
“Within luxury living, the ultimate amenity isn’t more devices; it’s time and attention returned to you.”
Privacy remains a key concern in connected homes: how does Origen deliver intelligent, predictive experiences without compromising personal data or security?
Trust isn’t earned by a privacy policy; it’s earned by architecture, so we treat privacy as the foundation, not a feature. A home that senses and learns has to be one you can trust, and that comes down to two things: how it perceives you, and where what it learns lives. The system reads presence, movement, even sleep through millimetre-wave radar and lidar, with no camera indoors: it senses everything and watches nothing. Your habits are processed and kept on the home’s own hardware, inside your own walls, and never handed off to the cloud. This is why automation and security aren’t a trade-off: keeping everything local is exactly what makes the home both responsive and safe.
How do you see AI transforming residential developments from connected homes into truly intelligent, community-wide ecosystems?
Once intelligence is woven in at the system level rather than bolted on device by device, the home stops being a collection of gadgets and becomes a space that adapts to you. Scale that across a development and the logic extends outward: buildings that flag maintenance before it becomes a problem, energy balanced across homes, shared amenities that respond to real demand. The global smart-home market is set to grow from roughly $147 billion in 2025 to about $848 billion by 2034.
“The opportunity isn’t connected homes, it’s intelligent communities where the infrastructure quietly works on residents’ behalf.”
What does predictive living look like in practice, and how can AI enhance everyday comfort, convenience, and peace of mind for residents?
Predictive living means the home gets it before you do. Air quality improves before you notice it’s bad. A maintenance issue is flagged before it becomes a breakdown. Lights dim as a film starts, because the home learned that’s what you do. We spend most of our waking hours at home, yet it’s the least intelligent space we own. The best technology disappears: you notice the outcome, not the system. The right question isn’t “how many devices does it support?” but “how often do I have to think about it?”
Why is the UAE, and Abu Dhabi in particular, uniquely positioned to lead the global shift towards AI-native, intelligent communities?
Timing and location favour Origen: Abu Dhabi just had a record Dh142 billion in housing transactions, up 44% in a single year, with luxury and branded residences selling out almost as fast as they launch. When that much capital floods the top end, everyone competes on the same marble, the same views, the same finishes, and all of those have a ceiling. Intelligence has no such ceiling: a home that truly understands you keeps getting better the longer you live in it, so its marginal value far outruns anything you can quarry. This is the shift we see coming: at the high end, intelligence, not materials, becomes the real differentiator. With a government that treats AI as national infrastructure and a culture that builds new rather than retrofits, Abu Dhabi is simply where an AI-native home should be born. This is why we built DOMIA here.
Source: Tahawul Tech