Our mission

Fraser Patterson, founder & CEO, June 2025

Skilled craft workers (electricians, carpenters, ironworkers, and other skilled trades) are quickly becoming the rate limiter on real-world progress. Everything our modern society relies on, from housing and roads to railways, energy systems, and now AI infrastructure, ultimately depends on people with hands-on, hard-earned skills building things in the real world — and the supply of this craft labor is tightening.

At Skillit, we believe the more pressing constraint isn’t in fact a lack of workers, but a lack of access to the workers we already have. Relative to current demand, the industry is short just 5% of the workforce. That means the vast majority of the workers needed are out there, they’re just hard to find and connect with using today’s legacy hiring systems (that’s why 1 in 20 workers missing feels more like 1 in 3!).

To fix this, we’re building the AI labor infrastructure for construction — a new system built on worker-provided data that uses AI agents to capture a worker’s real skills, experience, and preferences, and make them easy for employers to discover and connect with by call or text at any scale.

Need to hire 700 open-shop drywallers and 400 licensed IBEW electricians for a remote data-center build on a tight timeline? That’s the kind of complex labor coordination problem Skillit solves at a level of speed, precision and scale that simply hasn’t been possible before.

Today, Skillit powers the largest and fastest-growing network of job-ready skilled craft workers in the U.S., and is quickly being adopted by leading builders like Mortenson, DPR, Swinerton, Sundt, Lithko, Obayashi, and many others.

As global spending on physical infrastructure is projected to grow more than 70% to roughly $22 trillion a year over the next decade, we do see a construction workload emerging that will significantly outpace today’s labor capacity in volume, reach, and complexity (even when factoring in productivity gains from robotics and automation and an influx of workers seeking durable careers as AI reshapes knowledge work).

And so as we scale, we plan to meet this demand head-on by using our infrastructure’s live demand data and expanding the role of our AI agents to bring new generations of workers into construction and guide them toward employability in record time.

We started with construction because it’s the biggest pain point, and in our view, the toughest labor coordination problem in the physical economy. Solving it will give us the foundation to extend our system across all physical industries to support the world in achieving its most important and ambitious goals. From construction, manufacturing and energy to advanced facilities and even space.

In short, our plan is:

1. Build the AI hiring infrastructure for construction

2. Use live demand data and agents to expand the workforce earlier and help them get job-ready in record time

3. Extend the same infrastructure to all industries that build the physical world — manufacturing, energy, space etc.

This is how we scale the world’s craft so that anything can be built, anywhere.