If you’ve spent any real time in the contract cleaning business, you already know this: Change rarely arrives neatly packaged.
It tends to show up sideways. In staffing shortages, tighter margins, rising client expectations, and the quiet sense that the way we’ve always done things may not carry us forward much longer. At the 2025 BSCAI Contracting Success Conference in Las Vegas, that sense was easily identified. It was the chatter around AI.
This year, however, I noted it wasn’t the technology itself. It was the tone of the conversations around it. Less fearmongering. Less futurism. More honesty. More curiosity. More people asking, “What does this actually mean for my business — and for my team?”
I traveled from our home base in NYC to the fabulous Las Vegas for the conference this year and spent time with four voices our industry turns to for clarity. Leaders who took the stage live at Contracting Success included Jill Davie of WorkWave, technology futurist Crystal Washington, entrepreneur and leadership coach Kevin Hargis, and workforce expert Claudia St. John, founder of The Workplace Advisors. Together, they shared with me a grounded, practical look at where we are and where we’re likely headed.
1. We’re Early, and We’re Paying Attention
Despite the headlines, AI hasn’t swept through contract cleaning like a tidal wave. Not yet.
Jill Davie, who works closely with service businesses across the country, was refreshingly clear about where we actually stand.
“We’re so early in the AI revolution that I think that the next 12 months will give us more information about where we will be. I definitely see other industries… a little bit probably more on the early adopter curve. We are just bringing our AI to market now. I think, based on what I’ve seen here at the show, building service contractors (BSCs) are thirsty for it. They’re just not quite sure how to deploy it practically,” Davie says.
The hesitation isn’t resistance, it’s discernment. This is an industry built on trust and consistency, and most owners aren’t interested in chasing shiny objects just to say they did.
Where adoption is happening, it’s quiet and sensible. Owners are using AI to summarize spreadsheets, draft proposals, and prepare presentations. These are the kinds of tasks that steal hours from already full days.
“They’re starting to play with things more in the back office… read this Excel spreadsheet and summarize it for me or create a presentation template for me. They’re seeing amazing results. That would have taken me two hours to do. It took me 20 minutes,” Davie says.
Looking ahead, Davie sees the biggest shift coming not from dashboards or analytics, but from relief in the field. Automated scheduling. Smarter communication. Fewer frantic calls when someone doesn’t show.
“Instead of a supervisor saying, ‘Oh my gosh, now I’ve got to go find someone,’ the software can say, ‘Harmony just called off. I’m going to look at my employee population, see who’s nearby, who’s not going to go into overtime, who has availability,’” Davie says. “It reaches out via text, they click a link, take the shift, go perform the work, get paid — and you’re good to go.”
And she’s right. When the work gets easier for the people closest to it, everything else starts to steady.
“I think it’ll be communication, and I think it will be in the field … whether it be the hourly employee or the supervisor, [it will make] their job much easier. That’s where the magic happens,” Davie says.
2. AI Isn’t Magic, and That’s Good News
Crystal Washington has a wonderful way of lowering the temperature in a room without dismissing the stakes. She starts by reminding us that AI isn’t new. It’s just newly visible.
“They have been using AI for their whole lives. The term AI was invented in the 1950s. Those calculators we had in the 70s, by definition, that’s AI. Artificial intelligence is just a branch of computer science that allows machines to make sense of the world in the way that humans did,” Washington says.
What we’re really talking about now is generative AI, tools trained on patterns that can produce content and insights. Powerful, yes. But not mystical.
“It’s not magic. All it is is math,” Washington explains. “It uses pattern recognition after it’s been trained on a lot of information. But it’s imperfect. It does something called hallucination. It can make errors. Sometimes people have six fingers. Sometimes it quotes something that didn’t actually happen. It needs human oversight.”
Washington is candid about the hype and who benefits from it. “The people that are saying it’s inevitable are the CEOs of the companies that are trying to sell it. We’re actually in a hype cycle. I’m not saying it’s not powerful, it is, but we have a lot more control than people think, and currently it needs a great deal of oversight,” she says.
Her deeper concern isn’t automation itself. It’s how thoughtfully we use it. How we protect client data. How transparent we are. And how we treat the people who’ve helped us build our businesses.
“We do have a moral responsibility to the people that have helped us grow our companies, Washington says. “How can we train them on the new technology that might replace them eventually? I’ve seen companies say, ‘I’m not going to fire them. I’m going to train them.’ Think about their loyalty to you after something like that.”
Her advice for leaders isn’t to master everything overnight. It’s far simpler, and far more doable. According to Washington, “The best future-ready habit anyone can have is to be curious. You don’t have to master it. You can just ask, ‘Explain it to me like I’m a 10-year-old.’ That curiosity sparks learning, the way small children learn.”
She reminded me that curiosity is how progress actually happens.
3. The Real Divider Is Mindset, Not Technology
I spoke with Kevin Hargis after his learning session on business psychology. He looks at this moment less as a tech shift and more as a leadership one.
Some owners, he says, see AI as a threat. Others see it as a collaborator or something that can make the whole team stronger.
“Owners who thrive don’t see technology as a threat. They see it as a teammate,” Hargis says. “They stay curious, keep learning, and ask, ‘How can this make us better?’ instead of ‘What if this replaces us?’”
Hargis explains that framing matters. Because when leaders hoard information or tools, adoption stalls. When they invite people in, something different happens. “Use data to guide you, not define you. People don’t follow spreadsheets. They follow leaders who care,” he says.
Hargis believes the most effective leaders in the next chapter of our industry will become what he calls “bridge builders,” connecting systems with people, data with purpose.
Bridge builders: Let’s toss that ball around a bit with our leadership teams.
In an industry that depends on execution and trust, that kind of leadership may matter more than any platform or feature.
4. Culture Still Moves at a Human Pace
If technology is accelerating, culture might not, and that’s not a flaw. It’s reality.
Claudia St. John has watched this play out through growth cycles, economic shifts, and workforce changes long before AI entered the conversation.
“A lot of things move faster than culture. Growth moves faster than culture. Hiring moves faster than culture. AI hasn’t created a new dynamic, it’s just another example,” St. John says.
What concerns her most isn’t pushback. It’s unspoken fear.
“Business leaders should always assume there is fear. Even if they don’t say it. People are worried: ‘Is this going to take my job?’ They may be equating what’s happening in the economy to AI,” St. John adds.
For many workers, AI shows up alongside job uncertainty, economic pressure, and confusing signals about the future. Without clarity, it’s easy for those threads to get tangled.
St. John encourages leaders to slow down, explain intent, and verify outputs. “Don’t trust it. Trust but verify,” she says. “We’ve kicked the tires on it, and at least 50% of what we get back is not entirely true.”
She’s especially interested in how technology could finally help us solve one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: scheduling that doesn’t reflect real life.
“You could use technology to create schedules that satisfy the client’s demand and satisfy the employee’s demands. Employees quit because they can’t satisfy their family obligations. This could change that,” St. John says.
And then she widens the lens. The labor shortage, she reminds us, is not hypothetical. It’s coming, fast.
“We’re not going to have enough workers to do the job in the next 20 years. AI is the least of our problems. It’s a resource we’re going to need,” St. John says.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
For me, these conversations revealed something quieter and more reassuring versus the noise we can hear around AI. It’s not a story about replacement, but one about recalibration.
AI isn’t here to take the place of the people who clean our buildings, care for our spaces, and show up night after night. It’s here to support an industry under real pressure, one that needs better tools, clearer insight, and more humane systems.
The companies that will lead aren’t the ones chasing every new feature. They’ll be the ones who stay curious, communicate clearly, protect trust, and remember that technology works best when it serves the people doing the work.
Or, as business psychologist Hargis put it simply: treat it like a teammate.
That may be the most practical and most human strategy we can use and just one of the very special takeaways I’ll bring back to the team in NYC.