By Halah Kablan Ladson, Queen City Management Services (QCMS)

“Look at this cool dashboard I made with Claude Code! It has saved me so much time! The robots are coming! Automation is going to kill all the jobs! AI slop is all over the internet!” On and on and on…. I feel like I hear that everywhere I turn in some fashion. The exploding usage and popularity of all the LLMs/AI Apps has really shown everyone about capacity. This overall feeling of creativity, building, customization – at every entrepreneur fingertips has been eye opening and intoxicating to say the least. And because of the rapid adoption, every week somebody at a Charlotte networking event asks me whether AI is going to take over real estate and property management.

And my general answer is this – the adoption of AI in business, any business really – not just property management and real estate, will flush out a significant number of businesses and 100% determine who will stay relevant and prosper in the next 10 years. And usually, right behind all those statements and questions – is a more complex query – as a business owner and entrepreneur – what should you automate, systemize, and what do you do when this starts to replace people – and evidently - connection?

Here is the part that surprised me though. Most small businesses have not actually started. The U.S. Census Bureau has overall AI use sitting between 17 and 20 percent of American businesses through May 2026. Firms with 250 or more employees are at 37 percent. Firms with fewer than 20 employees – which is most of us standing in that Chamber room – are under 20 percent, and that number has not really moved.

And when the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis looked at why the holdouts are holding out, the top reason was not cost. It was not fear of robots either. It was owners saying AI simply did not apply to their business. About one in five had security concerns, and about the same share said they just did not know what AI could actually do.  That last one is the whole thing. “It does not apply to me” is almost never true. What is true is that nobody has shown you which parts of your business it applies to.

AI, at least for me and my property management business, has already allowed me to be WAY more productive, creative, and experimental than I have ever been in the last 13 years of running QCMS. Not in a bad way at all – customization WAS and IS expensive, time consuming, and plainly out of the budget as a small business owner. So as the LLMs got more main stream, better, and branched into non-tech heavy tasks, I happily dipped my toe in it. And now that I have been knee deep in AI for all of 2026, here is how I have learned to think about it, and how I would tell any business owner to think about it too.

Take everything you do, all the hats we wear as small business owners & entrepreneurs, and split it into two buckets. The What (automations/systems) and the Who (the people – connections, that can’t be replaced by AI).

The What

The what is the work - the tasks - the repetitive, predictable, same-every-time stuff that eats your whole day and does not care who does it. Admin tasks that are routine, mundane, and non-specialized. In my world, that is a missed phone call at 7 p.m., a utility bill that has to be reconciled the exact same way every single month, the FAQs every prospective tenant asks, the paperwork nobody ever sees but everybody needs. None of it builds a relationship. It just has to get done, on time, correctly. That is the What. And the What is exactly what you systemize – today, and without feeling one bit guilty about it.

So we did. We built an AI assistant named Harper who answers our calls in English and María who answers in Spanish. We built Parker to help our UNC Charlotte students with niche questions about room rentals and off campus housing. They are AI, and they say so on the call. They pull up the information, answer the real questions about rent and pets and move-in dates, and text the person the application link before they hang up. We did not hire a night shift. We just stopped losing the 7 p.m. lead to the one guy who happened to answer his phone. Our monthly billing that used to eat two full days now runs the same way every time and flags anything strange for me to look at. I still look at it. Every time.

The Who

Then there is the Who – the people who make the culture of any business.

The Who is the person. The connection. The moment somebody is trusting you with something that really matters, and they can feel whether you truly care or you are just running them through a process. It is the nervous first-time landlord who just found out their tenant stopped paying and has no idea what happens next. It is the owner who needs to hear, honestly and kindly, that the kitchen has to be updated before the place will rent for what they want. It is the hard conversation where somebody is scared or embarrassed and what they need is a human who has been there before. No AI, at least not that I use, does that. No bot can do that. And the minute you try to automate the Who – to drop a machine where a person is supposed to be – you do not save time or money. You lose the connection – the human aspect of problem solving in business and in life in general.

So that is the line. Systemize the What. Stay connected to the Who.

And here is the part that business owners need to talk more about - doing the first part, the systemizing the routine, admin tasks, is truly how you get more of the second. Every hour Harper and María hand back to me on the phones, every day that billing system saves, is an hour I now spend actually talking to owners, walking properties, sitting with a client through a decision they are scared to make. The automation did not make my business less human. It made it more human, because it took the drudgery off my plate and gave me back the time to show up for the parts that only a person can do. Connection and systemization are not enemies. Systemizing the What is how you can afford the Who.

So when you look at your business, as all entrepreneurs do almost all the time, trying to decide what to hand over to a machine, run each task through one simple question: does this build trust, expertise, authority, or does it just need to get done? If it just needs to get done – the same way, every time, where a small mistake is cheap to catch – systemize it now. If it is a moment where a real person is deciding whether to trust you, keep your hands on it. Keep a human in the loop, every single time.

That, I think, is what is really going to separate the businesses that make it from the ones that do not over the next ten years. It will not be who bought the fanciest AI. The ones who lose will be the ones who automate the Who – who let the bot handle the relationship and then wonder why their customers quietly left. The ones who win will be the ones who automate the What without mercy, so they have the time and the energy left to be human where it counts.

The robots are not coming for your business. But the competitor down the road who figured out this difference might be. So here is the whole strategy, for whatever you build in Charlotte: you do not have to choose between efficiency and connection. You systemize the one to protect the other. Start with the boring, repetitive work you hate – that is where all your time is hiding – and spend every hour you win back on the people. That is it. That is the report.

About the Author

Halah Kablan Ladson is Broker-In-Charge of Queen City Management Services (QCMS) in Charlotte, North Carolina, licensed in North Carolina and South Carolina. She has 22 years of real estate experience across four states and founded the firm in 2013. NC License No. 272964 · SC License No. 107533 · NC Firm No. C24768. Connect with Halah on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/halah