There are many more examples like this, but they all point to the same fundamental issue: construction lacks any technology lever that meaningfully augments craft labor. And at Skillit, we believe that missing lever is a system of record. Without a shared layer that makes workers visible, searchable, and reachable in real time, access to labor becomes the binding constraint. Small shortages then cascade into large operational failures — which is why being short just 1 in 20 skilled workers in practice, feels more like being short 1 in 3.

Building the AI labor infrastructure for construction
To fix this, we’re building an AI labor infrastructure for construction. It’s a new system built from first principles to solve access to skilled craft workers at the system level starting with the employers that really matter: Mid-market and enterprise contractors. They make up just 15% of America’s 920K construction firms, yet they employ 70% of the industry’s 8M workers and lead nearly all mission-critical projects.

To succeed, they need to hire a high volume of skilled workers across multiple trades, from union and open shop to local, per diem, and relocatable labor pools in both major MSAs and rural areas. This is an extremely complex labor coordination problem, which is why contractors are forced to rely on a patchwork of ill-fitting tools that don’t meet the need.

Skillit took a different approach, building an intentional new kind of infrastructure comprised of three enabling layers:

1. A structured construction labor graph that organizes vetted workers across all trades, regions, and attributes.

2. A talent search engine that instantly surfaces the right workers based on what actually matters to employers.

3. A communication layer, built for field and office alike, that reliably gets recruiters and workers on a phone call together fast.

This infrastructure digitizes craft labor itself, turning worker-provided data into a system of record and ultimately a system of intelligence for construction labor. It isn’t a job board, staffing marketplace, or workflow tool. It’s shared infrastructure no single contractor could build, and no lightweight startup could replace.

To give you an example of how it works. Skilled craft workers are either holding something, driving, or wearing gloves so typing into a device is a poor interface for capturing the kind of information hiring actually requires. So we built a way for workers to describe themselves naturally on a call, capture their real skills, experience, certifications, location, and preferences as structured data, and make them easy for employers to find and connect with by call or text, at any scale.

Whether it’s union carpenters and open-shop electricians, local crews and per-diem deployments across state lines, or civil, commercial, and industrial projects running in parallel, these are the kinds of labor coordination problems Skillit is now solving at a level of speed, precision, and scale that simply hasn’t been possible before.

Solving access to craft labor is just the start. As global spending on physical infrastructure grows over the next decade, demand will begin to meaningfully outpace today’s labor supply. Fixing access is the prerequisite. Act II is about solving the shortage itself.

Read Act 2