New year, new workforce trends. Let’s take a moment to look at the changes in AI, employer leverage, and more that could force Charlotte-area companies and employees to rethink how they operate in 2026. Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter joined WFAE's Marshall Terry for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: Catapult, an employers' association that serves companies in the Carolinas, identified several key trends. What are some of the highlights?
Tony Mecia: It’s going to be a focus on automation and AI. We’re going to I think see a lot more of that. You have an older generation that's retiring in pretty big numbers. You have fewer younger workers. You have more workers going into the trades than ever before, in things like plumbing and becoming electricians, things where maybe they can guard against some of the forces of AI that are coming.
There's also a shift in the balance of power. It used to be a few years ago, employees had a lot of leverage because there were a lot of opportunities. Job growth has slowed a little bit, and so that balance is shifting back a little bit toward the employers. The wage increases are down.
They're also noticing this trend towards what's called job hugging, in which employees are staying at their jobs for longer. They're not jumping ship as much as they used to.
Terry: What overall economic outlook did Catapult offer for the year?
Mecia: They're predicting cautious growth in 2026 amid changes in the workplace. They say we're going to see more automation, more jobs maybe taking on different roles — kind of shifting to adapt to some of those changes. They said that the best advice really is to keep up with your network and to keep building that network. Certainly, everybody thinks of LinkedIn, but also face-to-face. Maybe go have coffee with people in your network and meet new people, because a lot of those face-to-face interactions can really come in handy.
Terry: Let’s go now to some commercial real estate observations for the new year. What does the sale of a smaller office building in Elizabeth last month say about the overall sluggish market for office space right now?
Mecia: Yeah, last year was pretty slow for real estate deals related to office. You and I have talked before about how there haven't been as many big office projects, massive towers - those sorts of things. But the sale of Elizabeth on Seventh, which is a 103,000 square foot office building in the Elizabeth neighborhood, shows that there might be an appetite for some of these smaller deals because you have more potential buyers, more potential investors. This also coincides with a lot of companies taking less office space than they've needed historically.
Terry: Some bad news for malls. Fewer shoppers headed to some Charlotte-area malls this holiday season that just ended. What does the data on that say specifically?
Mecia: At The Ledger, we looked at some cell phone location data for Charlotte area malls and sort of how they compared with previous years. Most of the foot traffic at malls dropped from where it was last year, and it's still down at just about every mall in the Charlotte area from pre-COVID levels. So that suggests that, as a lot of things shift online, fewer people are going to malls in some cases. Although in other cases, it's not dropping off as steeply as you would think.
Terry: Over to west Charlotte now, where two neighborhoods are hoping to gain federal historic status. Which ones and why do they want the designation?
Mecia: The neighborhoods McCrorey Heights and Oaklawn Park. It's largely honorific. The people in the neighborhoods believe that it could help slow development in their neighborhood. Obviously, there's a lot of concern around Charlotte about how the character of some neighborhoods is changing if you come in and build a bunch of apartments or townhouses, that sort of thing. So it's just maybe one more move that neighborhoods are looking at in order to try to slow some of the development pressures that are coming in.
