Leaders today have more tools and more access to technology, data, and insights than ever before, yet behind closed doors, they admit they’re leading with less purpose than ever—and the future seems less clear. “Most of us are struggling on a day to day basis,” explained Kelly Monahan, future of work expert, researcher, and author, in her Monday, June 29 keynote at the 2026 BOMA International Conference & Expo.

We didn’t get here overnight. The things we complain about today—the difficulty of finding and retaining top talent, the speed of technology, no budget for training and development—are the same things people complained about in the 1950s. Yet because we’re still playing by a book written 75 years ago, those key complaints aren’t improving despite the speed at which new tools have emerged.

“We spend so much of our lives and energy at work, and so few of us are actually fulfilling the purpose and meaning it’s meant to do,” Monahan said. “We have lost the plot when it comes to AI today. We have lost the plot of what it means to be a leader.”

Here’s what happened—and how we can lead better.

AI’s Elevator Moment

Leaders today are facing more headwinds than ever, Monahan explained. Twenty years ago, you might expect to experience three to five economic shocks—in which your industry fundamentally changes and consumers behave differently—throughout your career. Today that number is closer to five to seven. “Trying to maintain business as usual is getting harder and harder,” Monahan said. “There has never been a harder time to lead. This is the most complex time you’re living in in our modern work history.”

Enter artificial intelligence. AI has been around in some form since the 1950s, but when OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, the world went wild over it. To some, it appeared to be commercial real estate’s new “elevator moment.” Monahan likened the emergence of generative and agentic AI to the way the invention of the elevator enabled architects to build buildings more than five stories tall. But the elevator wasn’t the whole story—elevators also needed safety systems before they could be specified in buildings, and the industry needed new architectural designs to accommodate them, new engineering roles, and many new skills and types of expertise.

“What I hear often from leaders and executives is the desire to move from floor 1 to floor 5 faster and cheaper. Where agentic AI is going is the elevator moment of your time,” Monahan said. “We can now begin to safely move up and capture new value in ways we had never been able to before. That requires a completely new blueprint for how we’re designing our organizations.”

The New Blueprint for Incorporating AI in the Workplace

Imagine you’re being asked to architect a new kind of organization. How will you do it? What is your design philosophy and design principle, Monahan asked?

“Work has to be about people,” she said. “Yes, it’s about profits. Yes, you need to make money and return to your investors, but work is about creating a human experience.”

Start by going back to your teams to develop your design principles—you don’t have to do it alone. In commercial real estate, think about how you can find ways to incorporate AI from the bottom up so that your people can focus their time on higher quality work. “They can connect back in with their colleages, your clientele, and your tenants,” Monahan said. “They can deliver a more human experience because AI is taking on some of the work. It helps your workers become more intelligent, not less intelligent.”

AI requires us to ask questions of ourselves. What are the new demands and needs emerging? What is the new demand you’re sensing in your market? What is the new value that needs to be created? “If we only think about what can be optimized and cost-controlled, we’re going to miss a tremendous opportunity to create jobs in this moment as opposed to optimizing them away,” Monahan said.

Monahan offered five ways to design your leadership blueprint so you can get ahead of AI rather than allowing it to change the way you work:

1. AI changes what we work on. What work should you allow AI to do? “What I would encourage you to do is to ask your team, what work do you hate doing?” Monahan said. “So often we don’t ask that. We have the mindset of, ‘This is growing pains. This is how you develop. You have to put in your time.’ What are the problems that are keeping you up at night? What are the things your workforce doesn’t do very well, and where can AI begin to automate that?” This could be anything from first drafts of tenant communications to work order summaries, vendor and service reporting, and more. With their newfound capacity, your workforce can repurpose their time to deliver higher value to clients.
2. AI is going to make things more complex in the short term. This technology is not perfect. It still hallucinates sometimes, Monahan said. That’s why it’s crucial to figure out where AI is allowed to take action and where is it never allowed to take over. “We can also automate the flying experience, but we chose not to,” Monahan said. “That’s the decision you have to make today.”
3. AI is going to force you to make ethical decisions in ways you didn’t have to worry about before. Allowing the technology to create a hyper-personalized experience means you will need to collect more data than ever before. What data are you collecting on your tenants? Who’s being observed with all of the cameras and sensors you’ll need as part of that? Who has access to the data? How do you capture meaningful consent if someone decides to work out of your building? “These technologies have a way of taking off like a high-speed train,” Monahan said. “Once we become addicted to them, we can’t stop… These are things you want to get ahead of so we don’t have the social media dilemma we’ve seen over the last decade.”
4. A different kind of worker is going to show up. Monahan described the gray collar worker—a combination of blue collar and white collar work coming together in the middle. “Your maintenance people are going to have to become more comfortable working with apps and sensors,” she said. “It’s going to change everything about what these roles require.” Are you aware of the gray collar workforce in your organization, and do you have a skilling plan in place to make sure you can make the leap?
5. Leadership’s purpose will change. Managers often exist for information flow, making sure the team understands what clients want. “What happens when information and intelligence become democratized?” Monahan asked. “What happens when you no longer have to be a leader to have intelligence and experience?” Leaders will still exist, but they need to become coaches and empower others to succeed.

Reclaiming the Plot: 4 Leadership Principles You Need Now

You can still lead your organization and keep your humanity, even as you scale up your AI adoption, Monahan said. Remember these four tips as you redraw the blueprint for your company.

1. How you show up every day is what matters. “We’ve been trained to see the business as a chess board, as a game to win,” Monahan said. “If we’ve been treating business as a game to win, we can easily use people as pawns, and that’s what’s happening today.” Instead, think of your job as being a gardener, she urged. “People are able to flourish and thrive under your leadership,” Monahan explained. “People are not pawns. They are meant to thrive and flourish in changing conditions.”
2. Listen better—even when it’s hard. “The concern is not so much about active listening—it’s what we do when truth is surfaced,” Monahan said. “Do we have enough gravitas as leaders to change how we show up in this moment?”
3. Do you know what should remain uniquely human in your organization? AI outcomes are a leadership issue, Monahan said. If something goes wrong, what does that accountability look like?
4. Demonstrate trust and be trustworthy. People embraced elevators and skyscrapers because someone went on top of the elevator to prove the safety instrument worked, Monahan said. “Workers today are asking us to start getting on top of the elevator and cut the rope. How do I actually trust you as a leader? How do I trust where we’re going with AI?” If people don’t trust you as a leader today without AI, they won’t trust you with it either.

“If you’re still showing up as a leader the way you showed up last year or the year before, that’s not good enough,” Monahan said. “We need new blueprints.”