A California commercial real estate company just proved something every small business owner needs to hear: you don’t need a tech team to build an AI-powered operation. You just need to train the people you already have.
PR Newswire reported this week that NewMark Merrill Companies, a shopping center owner and manager operating across California, Colorado, and Illinois, completed a six-session AI training program that turned 13 non-technical employees into AI solution builders. The result: 53 working AI tools deployed, 3,783 hours of annual capacity recovered, and a 34% improvement in self-assessed output quality.
What This Actually Means
This isn’t a story about a tech company going all-in on AI. NewMark Merrill manages shopping centers. Their employees work in accounting, leasing, property management, and acquisitions. None of them were technology experts before the program.
The company partnered with training firm Adaptig to run a structured program where cross-departmental employees identified real friction points in their own daily work, then built custom AI solutions to fix them. No IT department required. No six-figure software implementation. Just 13 people, six sessions, and a mandate to solve problems they already understood.
In Acquisitions, underwriting workflows that previously required eight hours of manual document review were cut to under an hour. In Accounting, CAM reconciliations that consumed a full workday are now produced in minutes. In Property Management, daily security patrol reports across multiple centers are now automatically summarized with exceptions flagged for human review.
That’s the model worth paying attention to: identify the person closest to the daily friction, teach them the tools, and get out of the way.
If your business is still treating AI as something IT handles or something you’ll “eventually look into,” you’re falling behind operators who already figured this out. The free AI training programs built specifically for small businesses have never been more accessible.
The Numbers Behind It
3,783 hours of recovered annual capacity is the equivalent of roughly 473 working days. That’s nearly two full-time positions worth of output redirected to higher-value work, not through hiring, not through software subscriptions, but through training existing staff.
That number hits differently when you consider context from McKinsey’s 2025 research: only about 35% of small businesses have meaningfully adopted AI. The majority are still watching from the sidelines while the early movers stack compounding productivity gains year after year.
Self-assessed output quality in the NewMark program rose from 3.2 to 4.3 on a five-point scale, a 34% improvement. That metric came from the employees themselves. The gains were largest in analytical depth and presentation quality, which are exactly the capabilities that close deals, win clients, and command higher prices.
The Federal Reserve’s 2025 small business data found that 43% of small business owners work more than 60 hours per week. The case for any tool that recovers meaningful time isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a survival play. For more on building systems that support sustainable growth, see what Jensen Huang’s AI job creation thesis means for small operators.
The Hustler’s Library Take
Most small business owners approach AI one of two ways: they either ignore it entirely or they buy a subscription to a tool they don’t fully use. Neither approach moves the needle.
What NewMark Merrill did is the third path, and it’s the one that actually works. They treated AI literacy as an internal skill, not an external product. They identified their most friction-heavy workflows first, then trained the employees who lived inside those workflows to build solutions. The technology was secondary. The structured training process was primary.
The lesson isn’t “buy the same software NewMark Merrill uses.” The lesson is: stop waiting for AI to be simple enough to use without effort. It already is. The gap is training, not technology.
Businesses that invest in developing a sustainable competitive moat in 2026 are doing it by building capabilities their competitors won’t bother developing. AI literacy across your team is one of those capabilities right now.
What You Should Do
If you run a business with even two or three employees, this model is replicable at your scale. Here’s where to start:
1. Audit your most painful recurring tasks. Pick the three workflows that eat the most time each week across your team. Don’t start with the biggest problems; start with the most repetitive ones. Repetitive tasks are where AI tools produce the fastest and most measurable ROI. The NewMark team started with document review, daily report summaries, and reconciliations. What’s your version of those?
2. Train the person doing the work, not the person managing it. NewMark deliberately chose participants who weren’t managers or tech leads. They chose people closest to the daily friction. Your front-line employees know exactly where the time goes. Give them access to AI tools and a structured block of time to experiment, even if it’s two hours a week. OpenAI’s free AI training program, which we covered previously, is a direct starting point for exactly this kind of team-level skill-building. See how to use that program here.
3. Measure recovery, not just output. Don’t just ask “are people using AI?” Ask “how many hours did we get back this month?” Track recovered capacity the same way you’d track any operational metric. When you can point to 47 hours recovered in a month across three employees, the case for continued investment becomes obvious. If you’re still building the operational foundation for that kind of tracking, this guide to building a profitable service business covers the systems layer you need first.
Source: PR Newswire | Authority: McKinsey AI Adoption Research
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