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.

Using AI to solve access to craft labor
At Skillit, we believe the most pressing constraint isn’t simply 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. Starting with sourcing and connecting, and moving downstream to reimagine interview, offer, and compliance workflows, we’re building the end-to-end hiring infrastructure for construction.

Solving the labor shortage itself
As global spending on physical infrastructure is projected to grow more than 70% to roughly $22 trillion a year over the next decade, we 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). Radically better access is critical, but it won’t be enough and so as we scale, we plan to meet 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 to employability in record time. In doing so, we remove the structural and economic friction that limits net-new labor entering the industry in the first place.

To give a sense of scale, over the next decade, under today’s status quo, construction is on track to lose roughly 800,000 workers as retirements outpace successful new entrants. Our theory is that this loss is driven less by lack of interest and more by early-stage failure: workers are routed into the wrong roles, at the wrong time, with unstable early economics, and exit the industry before becoming productive.

By using live demand data to route entry-level workers only into verified, active demand, sequencing training and placement to minimize idle time, stabilizing early earnings, and rapidly re-routing failed placements instead of losing workers entirely, we believe Skillit can materially increase both entry and persistence. At scale, this could lift end-to-end conversion from ~40% to ~70–80%, shifting the industry from decline to growth and supporting ~1+ million additional productive workers over ten years relative to the status quo.

Scaling the world’s craft
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 a foundational superpower to extend our system across all physical industries, supporting more than 1 billion skilled workers worldwide as they deliver the world’s most important and ambitious goals — from construction, manufacturing, defense and energy to advanced facilities and even space.

In short, our plan is:

Act 1. Build the AI hiring infrastructure for construction and use it to connect job-ready workers with top employers, big and small

Act 2. Use the demand data to attract entry-level workers and maximize how many become economically productive

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

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

Read Act 1