AI, Leading with Humanity, and the Future of Work (BOMA 2026 Preview)

There’s no question that artificial intelligence is impacting the way we work—and while AI can make us more efficient, it can also add more work to our plates instead of streamlining the way we work. Kelly Monahan, future of work expert, research executive, and author, explains how to navigate AI’s effects on commercial real estate ahead of her Monday keynote at the 2026 BOMA International Conference & Expo.

In short: “Work is about people, not technology,” Monahan said.

How New Technologies Are Impacting CRE

AI and other tech are changing the industry in two key ways, according to Monahan:

• Building design and operation. “Technology is becoming increasingly important in terms of the customer/client experience,” Monahan said. “Today, it’s much more about curating an experience.”
• Talent. Monahan’s new book, Essential: How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts Are Creating a New Human-Powered Leadership, discusses the rise of the gray-collar workforce. “We have this false dichotomy of either a white-collar worker, where you work with a computer at a desk, or blue-collar, where you’re in maintenance, HVAC repairs, or that kind of thing,” Monahan explained. “The reality is, we need someone who’s able to have a hybrid—you have that physical, technical skillset alongside the technology skillset.”

Aside from changing the way we work, AI is also potentially fueling burnout, Monahan said. It can make us efficient but at what cost?

“The majority of the workforce is already doing more with less,” Monahan said. “We know that the mental health crisis coming out of the pandemic is profound in the workplace, and it’s against this backdrop that we now have said, ‘OK, everyone needs to go learn AI.’ What we’ve done in many situations is handed out a Copilot license or a ChatGPT license and have asked people to go figure it out.”

In many ways, AI is adding more friction and complexity to people’s jobs instead of less because job descriptions were never changed to reflect the emergence of new technologies, Monahan added.

“It’s no shock that that leads to overwhelm from an employee experience perspective,” she said. “We’ve just continued to hand out another burden, and all the headlines are saying, ‘You’re going to lose your job because of AI.’ So there’s also this profound fear of, ‘I don’t necessarily want to adopt this technology and give my intelligence over to it if it’s going to lead me to lose a job.’ That combination of factors is what we’re seeing in the data. Those AI super-users are actually the ones most burned out in your organization today.”

How to Use AI Smarter

AI doesn’t have to lead to burnout, Monahan said. Smart leaders will look at how it can complement human work over the next few years instead of focusing exclusively on the next quarter’s results. AI is “the elevator of our time,” Monahan explained. The invention of the elevator not only moved people from floor to floor faster, it changed the way people think about buildings. No longer were structures limited to five stories.

“We completely reinvented the way we think about blueprints and buildings and the art of the possible,” Monahan said. “Now we have skyscrapers everywhere, but that’s a relatively new phenomenon because of the elevator.”

Focusing solely on efficiency—doing the same thing you’ve done for the last 20 years, but faster and in a larger quantity—isn’t going to grow your organization, Monahan said.

“There’s certainly an efficiency play there, but that’s not the real opportunity,” she added. “I think the harder point is: What are the new blueprints of work? What does the new value creation begin to look like as we have this new technology and are working alongside AI? What are the new experiences we can create within our buildings? How much more can we personalize that experience based on AI technology? How do we get safer and take advantage of digital twins and become better at predictive maintenance? Those are the type of questions I don’t necessarily see enough leaders focused on.”

3 Ways to Lead with Humanity

People-centered leadership is not just possible in the age of AI—it’s necessary, Monahan argued. Leaders should ask themselves these three questions to keep their focus on the humans helping their organizations operate:

1. What is your value proposition? “As silly as that sounds, 42% of American workers today can’t answer that question on behalf of their company,” Monahan said. “To me, before we even talk about the technology itself, we have to ground ourselves in what is our value proposition—and it has to be more than profits to some degree.”
2. Do you trust people to work? AI can be used to pursue efficiency at all costs or it can be a force multiplier for motivated employees. “If you believe people fundamentally don’t want to work and they cannot be trusted, we’re going to go down an efficiency and surveillance path with new technology,” Monahan said. “Do you trust people? Is the goal of this technology to elevate more humanness in our workforce, or are you actually trying to diminish that, find efficiency, and remove people? Those are very different pathways.”
3. Do you have a plan to upskill people? “Only about one in four organizations today have a skilling program in place for AI. That is not enough,” Monahan said. “How do we make sure we’re emphasizing as much of the skilling and learning side of this as possible?”

“This is how you’re going to keep people first,” Monahan added. “Having a value proposition, trusting them, and making sure you’re investing in their skill development is going to protect the people side of this and help you innovate.”

Ready to learn more from Kelly Monahan? Don’t worry—there’s still time to register the 2026 BOMA International Conference & Expo. Sign up today!