How Companies Of All Sizes Can Close The Trades Shortage In The AI Era

Alok Chanani, BuildOps CEO and U.S. Army veteran, is reshaping how commercial contractors run their businesses and build what lasts.

Over the past several months, Meta, BlackRock and Google each did the same strange thing. They started paying to train electricians.

Meta committed $115 million to a trades academy that covers tuition, pays to attend and guarantees a job. BlackRock, the largest asset manager on earth, put up $100 million over five years to connect 50,000 workers with skilled trades training. Google added $50 million for union and trade association programs aimed at preparing more than 300,000 more.

Together, that is roughly $265 million, spread over several years, aimed at one problem. The size of the commitment says something about the problem: the shortage of people who can physically build things is becoming one of the hardest constraints on the American economy.

How The Shortage Predates AI​

​I run the software that more than 1,500 commercial contractors use to schedule and staff their crews, so I see the underside of these announcements every day.

Last year, we surveyed more than 600 contractors across the U.S. and Canada to take the pulse. Half the electricians told us demand from data centers is climbing, the exact buildings major tech companies are racing to put up. And nearly half of all the contractors said close to a quarter of their open positions are sitting empty right now.

The work is there. The financing is there. The people are not. That was true before anyone typed a prompt into a chatbot.

The people building AI keep warning it will hollow out office work. Anthropic’s CEO says half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish (registration required) within five years. Seventy million Americans go to work in a professional or management role, and a lot of them are about to go looking for something a machine can’t do from a keyboard.​