NewMark Merrill Companies Completes AI Pioneer Program, Deploying 53 Employee-Built AI Solutions Across the Enterprise

Twelve-week, six-session program trains cross-departmental champions who together recover more than 3,700 hours of annual capacity

CALABASAS, Calif., Aug. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NewMark Merrill Companies, Inc., a leading owner, developer, and manager of retail shopping centers in California, Colorado, and Illinois, announced the completion of its AI Pioneer Program, a six-session enterprise initiative that trained 13 employees from across all departments in the organization to design and deploy artificial intelligence solutions for their own day-to-day work.

Rather than adopting a single off-the-shelf AI product, NewMark Merrill took a different approach: it 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. Who was in the room mattered as much as what they built. These weren't necessarily managers, and deliberately weren't technology experts. They were the people closest to the daily friction, chosen for their ability to spot a problem, build a practical solution, and bring their colleagues along with 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 Taylor Kuchman, Acquisitions & 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."

The results were measured throughout the entire process. 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 percent 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.

"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 fifty-three answers. That is the kind of change that lasts, because they own it."

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.

"We have run this program inside a lot of companies, and NewMark Merrill did something most organizations only talk about," said Mateo Romano, Co-Founder of Adaptig. "Sandy deliberately filled that room with people who had no AI background and told them plainly that this would not come from the top — that leadership's job was to remove obstacles, not hand out ideas. That gave the thirteen Pioneers the confidence to bring their real problems: the reconciliation that eats a full day, the report nobody wants to write, the workaround a system has forced on them for years. And because Accounting, Leasing, IT, Operations, Development, Marketing and HR were all around the same table, they solved those problems for each other instead of one department at a time. By the last session they had stopped being users of software and started being the people who build it — that is the change that stays with a company long after we leave."

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.

About NewMark Merrill Companies, Inc.

NewMark Merrill Companies, Inc. owns and/or manages a portfolio of over 110 shopping centers valued at more than $3 billion. Since 1987, President and Chief Executive Officer Sandy Sigal has led the company of shopping centers representing over 2,000 tenants and 13 million square feet in California, Colorado, and Illinois. The Company has founded and invested heavily in BrightStreet Ventures, its technology company, which is working on leading edge solutions for landlords and tenants to succeed in today's retail environment. For more information, please visit NewMarkMerrill.com.  

About Adaptig

Adaptig helps organizations adopt artificial intelligence through structured, methodology-driven training. Its SHIFT AI Pioneer Program builds internal AI capability by training cross-functional champions to design and deploy solutions for their own work, with measured results at every stage. Learn more at adaptig.ai.

CONTACT: David Ebeling, [email protected]

SOURCE NewMark Merrill Companies