The commercial cleaning industry has already lived through plenty of disruption. New equipment, chemistry, robotics, changing customer expectations, and nonstop margin pressure are the norm.
But according to Dean Mercado, founder of Online Marketing Muscle, the next significant shift will not be about tools alone. It will be about who is actually doing the work.
And in many companies, that “who” will not always be human.
Mercado believes that by 2026, the most competitive building service contractors will not just have bigger teams. They will have more innovative teams that include what he calls AI employees. That employee is not a person you hire. It is a digital coworker you design, train, and deploy.
“If we are not going into this with our eyes open and our mind open to what is possible, we are in trouble,” Mercado said.
When AI feels like a punch in the face
To explain the urgency, Mercado reached for an unlikely source: Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, whom he cites as saying: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
“And I am telling you,” Mercado said, “where AI is going in 2026 and beyond is going to be like that punch in the face for us.”
Mercado sees 2026 as a pivot point when many of your competitors will move from dabbling in AI to embedding it into their operations.
“Either you look to where things are going, or you are going to be in trouble,” he said. “Because at the end, 2026 is the pivotal year. That is where a lot of your competitors will start adopting and adapting these technologies to work on their behalf.”
He summarized the new competitive reality in one word.
“A big word that I am going to throw out to you for 2026 is speed,” Mercado said. “Speed is going to be king in 2026. But not the speed we were used to. Usually, we would trade off speed for comprehensiveness or speed for competence. Not any longer. People are going to stop tolerating and start expecting even more speed out of you, but with confidence. Why? Because your competitors are going to be able to do that.”
Field workers and the vulnerable back office
Cleaning companies are built on people in the field. Mercado is the first to acknowledge that.
“Especially in the cleaning industry, 90% of your staff is in the field doing work, cleaning,” he said. The frontline work does not disappear. But he warned that the first significant impact of AI will be behind the scenes.
“Your back office is where it is going to hit the most,” Mercado said.
If you walked the recent ISSA Show floor, you likely noticed more robotics and autonomous equipment. Mercado sees those changes expanding over time, even onto job sites. Yet he believes the more immediate risk is to the way you handle scheduling, estimating, marketing, proposals, documentation, and customer communication.
“Either you adapt or die at this point,” he said. “And that is scary for a lot of us, but it does not have to be. Do not leave it to the last minute.”
Mercado’s concern is that many companies are planning for 2026 without truly planning for AI.
“A lot of people I am talking to right now are already in their planning for 2026,” he said. “What are they leaving out? They are leaving out AI and this concept of AI employees. They might be touching on AI, but remember, AI in and of itself is just a tool. It is just a technology. It is what you do with this stuff that makes a difference. And that is why this concept of AI employees is so important.”
AI employees
So what does an AI employee look like? The best, most forward-thinking companies will start using AI employees to fill specific roles and perform certain functions on behalf of the company, Mercado said.
“Instead of having to continuously hire for some of those tedious things or some of those things that humans tend to make a lot of mistakes along the lines, you are going to start seeing these AI employees,” he said.
Mercado connects this to his long-standing “clone the owner” methodology, which is all about creating leverage.
“That methodology gets into a lot of different things, but overall, it is about you getting leverage on your business,” he said. “And the biggest way to do that is AI.”
He does not recommend starting with a hundred AI roles. He wants owners to begin with one.
“It is not about coming out of the gate, filling roles with 100 different AI employees,” Mercado said. “We just need to get your feet wet and get you starting to think a little bit differently about what is what.”
Meet ‘the Documenter’
In Mercado’s own company, the first AI employee he has built has a clear job and a memorable name: The Documenter.
As Mercado noted, too many companies keep their best knowledge locked up in a not-always-reliable storage system.
“We cannot allow genius to reside in any one particular person’s head,” Mercado said. “And No. 1, I am pointing at all of you business owners out there that have a lot of that genius in here. But the problem is it is in your head. And when you remove yourself from the picture, we have a problem. We cannot afford to allow that to happen.”
He has a blunt warning for owners who keep putting it off. Without an AI employee who handles documentation, “a phrase I use is ‘document or disappear,’” Mercado said. “Do not let that be you.”
Three plays that change the game
Mercado emphasized that an AI employee is not a magic black box. It needs structure. He thinks like a coach with a playbook.
“Once we name an AI employee, we start giving it plays to run with,” he said. “Imagine yourself playing football, and you are the head coach on the sideline, and you have your book that has all your plays in it. Whenever this scenario happens, use one of these plays. You must have that playbook laid out.”
First is the standard operation procedures (SOP) draft generator.
“Basically, it takes ideas that I have, ideas that key employees have in my business, and it turns them into a structured, usable SOP that can actually be used by our team, whether it is human or AI employees, to follow,” he said. “We train it, and we feed it our template for SOPs, so all our SOPs always look and read the same exact way. They have all the same kind of detail, so that any intelligent human or AI that we bring into this can carry it out.”
Second is the process extractor. This is designed for owners who do not know where to begin or what to type into AI.
“Most people do not know what to feed AI,” Mercado said. “But if you tell the AI, ‘Ask me everything you need to know for you to be the best at this role. If I was going to have you do this and you were going to be the best in the business at this one function, what do you need for me to tell you in order to do that? Start asking me questions one by one.’ And then you answer those questions.”
He pointed out that voice input makes this even easier.
“The cool thing about AI, especially ChatGPT or Gemini, is you can speak to them,” he said. “So you do not have to type all this out anymore. And I am a lazy typer, so I have arguments with my AI over this stuff all the time because I am speaking with it in that way.”
The third play is the process optimizer for companies that already have systems written down.
“SOPs, processes, they are not meant to sit on a shelf somewhere,” Mercado said. “If you are not looking at these things at least every 90 days and having somebody assigned to looking at every single one you have at least every 90 days and signing off on them, you have problems. Things are changing too fast now.” The process optimizer feeds existing procedures into AI and asks how to improve them.
“I feed in my current process, and I use AI and scripts we build in AI to improve that process,” he said. “How could we do this better so that we save money, we save time, we become more effective for our audience out there?”
In his view, those three plays alone can “change the game for you in 2026.”
Where should business owners start?
For owners who are not using AI beyond simple Q&A, Mercado understands the feeling of overwhelm. His advice is to start with one mission-critical system and link it to a clear business goal.
“The biggest place I say to get started is to tie it in with my clone the owner framework,” he said. “Your systems are assets. Your systems are intellectual property. If I am the owner, I want to increase the value of my company. When I create intellectual property, that increases the value of my company.”
He recommends beginning with the client life cycle, especially marketing and sales, because that is where many companies are struggling.
“It starts with your marketing,” he said. “The life cycle of a client includes marketing, sales, your client onboarding, fulfillment, and all your administrative tasks that you do after the fact.”
In practice, he often guides owners to pick one manageable area.
“You could start with your short-term marketing approach,” Mercado said. “How do you systematize just your short-term marketing? A short-term marketing approach is something that brings you a lead within 30 days.”
From there, owners can expand.
“Once you do one, that means the next one can be a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger,” he said.
For 2026, Mercado’s message to the industry is simple. Start small, but start now.
