At Skillit, we believe the most pressing constraint in construction today isn’t 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 its workforce. The vast majority of the workers needed are out there — they’re just hard to find and harder to connect with using legacy hiring systems. That’s why being short 1 in 20 workers operationally feels more like being short 1 in 3.

This pattern isn’t unique to construction. Every major industry that has faced acute labor pressure has eventually found a foundational technology that expanded access. Software for example used the internet to make talent globally reachable. Healthcare is using AI to remove administrative work from scarce clinicians. Retail deployed robotics to automate repeatable physical tasks.

Construction of course couldn’t use any of these because craft work is embodied. There is no administrative layer to automate away. It’s inherently local — you can’t build a data center from a laptop. And despite progress, robots remain far from meaningfully augmenting human craft in dynamic, real-world environments (never mind replacing them. Also don’t get me started on Jevon’s Pradaox!). As a result, construction never got its access-expanding technology.

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, certifications, location, and preferences, and make them easy for employers to discover and connect with by call or text at any scale.

Hiring union carpenters AND open-shop electricians? Maybe you’re hiring locally AND deploying per-diem crews across state lines? What if you’re executing civil, commercial, OR industrial projects? It doesn't matter. That’s the kind of 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 being adopted by leading builders including Mortenson, DPR, Swinerton, Sundt, Lithko, Obayashi, and others.

Starting with sourcing and connecting — and moving downstream into interview, offer, and compliance workflows — we’re building the end-to-end hiring infrastructure for construction, for employers big, and eventually small.

As global spending on physical infrastructure continues to grow over the next decade, demand will begin to meaningfully outpace today’s labor supply. Fixing access is the prerequisite. Act 2 is about using this infrastructure to solve the shortage itself.

Read Act 2