NewMark Merrill Companies Inc., an owner, developer and manager of shopping centers in California, Colorado and Illinois, has completed AI Pioneer Program, a six-session enterprise initiative that trained 13 employees from all departments in the organization to design and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for their own day-to-day work.
NewMark Merrill’s 13 AI Pioneer Champions are Ivano Bufi, Delaune Cheney, Samantha Dubon, Chad Kaplan, Taylor Kuchman, Michael Mendez, Tim Murphy, David Rosenthal, Isak Sabzanov, Elijah Sigal, Holly Tartaglino, Artur Tarverdyan and Larissa Yllescas.
Rather than adopting a single off-the-shelf AI product, NewMark Merrill taught its own people to build. Over six structured sessions delivered in partnership with Adaptig, two participants from different departments across the company — accounting, collections, property management, leasing, development, acquisitions, information technology, marketing and human resources — identified real bottlenecks in their own work and built working tools to address them.
“The AI Pioneer program at Newmark Merrill helped me identify roadblocks in our acquisition and development processes and build solutions we can roll out across the team,” said Kuchman, acquisitions and development associate. “The time and expertise that Mateo at Adaptig and the team at Newmark Merrill devoted to this also opened my eyes to challenges other departments were facing and the solutions they were putting in place. Those solutions and the companywide collaboration they created made this program valuable.”
Participants logged 53 completed solutions and documented 3,783 hours of recovered capacity annually, the equivalent of roughly 473 working days, or nearly two full-time positions returned to higher-value work. Self-assessed output quality rose from 3.2 to 4.3 on a five-point scale, a 34% improvement, with the largest gains in the depth and presentation of analytical work.
The solutions span the full breadth of the business. In Acquisitions, underwriting workflows that previously required eight hours of manual document review were reduced to under an hour. In Property Management, daily security patrol reports across multiple centers are now summarized automatically, with exceptions escalated for human review. In Accounting, CAM reconciliations that consumed a full day are now produced in minutes. In Information Technology, a manual Excel-based credit card allocation process was replaced entirely by an internally built web application.
The program concluded recently with a showcase in which each participant presented their work to company leadership. Participants rated the program 4.2 out of 5 for satisfaction, with a Net Promoter Score of +70.
“What impressed me most was not the technology — it was our people,” said Sandy Sigal, president and chief executive officer of NewMark Merrill Companies. “We did not hand anyone a tool and tell them to use it. We gave them the skills and asked them to solve the problems they know better than anyone else does. Thirteen employees came back with 53 answers. That is the kind of change that lasts, because they own it.”
