That’s according to Dan Peyovich, president and CEO of Dycom Industries, who says surging demand for the infrastructure behind AI—from fiber networks to data centers—is colliding with a persistent shortage of hands-on workers.

“There’s no doubt there’s a skilled trade shortage now,” he said at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona on Tuesday. 

And he’s not wrong: A wave of data center construction, an aging workforce, and decades of education pipelines steering students toward four-year degrees have converged into what industry leaders increasingly describe as a structural labor gap. This year alone, the construction industry is facing workforce shortages of more than 550,000 unfilled positions.

By 2030, an estimated 2.1 million skilled trades jobs in the U.S. could go unfilled—with potential economic losses reaching $1 trillion annually—according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Peyovich’s company sits squarely in the middle of that demand spike. Dycom Industries, which builds telecommunications and utility infrastructure, now employs about 20,000 skilled workers—growth fueled in part by its $1.95 billion acquisition of a data center electrical contractor in 2025, as part of a broader push into AI-era infrastructure buildouts.

“As we stand today, and for as far as we can see into the future, somebody still has to be out there working with their hands,” Peyovich added in conversation with Fortune’s Diane Brady.

He speaks from experience. Early in his career, Peyovich worked as a carpenter before eventually moving into corporate leadership, drawn—by his own admission—to higher pay. But now, he’s become an advocate for rebuilding the skilled trades pipeline at a time when interest in the field has lagged behind demand.

Filling the skilled trades gap is proving easier said than done

In an era where AI is increasingly reshaping, and in some cases threatening, traditional white-collar roles, hands-on work has emerged as a more stable and, in many cases, lucrative path for Gen Z workers seeking job security and upward mobility.

Filling those roles, however, has proved easier said than done. Peyovich said decades of underinvestment in hands-on careers—and the steady decline of early exposure to manual work—have left today’s labor pool less prepared than in previous generations.

“Filling the skilled workforce in today’s world is not like it used to be,” he said. “You don’t have people that have a lot of outside-elements exposure or working on farms that you can pull in.”

Instead, he said, employers are increasingly starting with candidates who arrive with little to no hands-on experience.

“You’re really taking—I use the joke, but it’s not really a joke because I have two college kids—the kid playing XBOX at home on his couch,” Peyovich said. “And you’re going to try to upskill them to be out in the elements, working with tools, working with customers, working in difficult situations.”

In order to attract talent, he said there’s a need to go beyond salary, and boost company benefits. New hires at Dycom Industries automatically received two weeks of vacation on the first day—something that new hires often have to accumulate.

The talent gap has also pushed Dycom to invest directly in training. Earlier this year, the company announced plans to build a 49-acre immersive training campus in Georgia aimed at preparing a new generation of skilled trades workers.

Major companies across industries have also ramped up efforts as labor shortages deepen. Earlier this year, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, committed $100 million to skilled trade training programs designed to reach 50,000 workers over the next five years. Home improvement retailer Lowe’s similarly pledged $250 million over the next decade to train 250,000 skilled trades workers.

But even as investment accelerates, the assumption that skilled trades are insulated from AI is starting to shift. Earlier in the Fortune conference, the head of research at Cognizant. Ollie O’Donoghue, noted that while trades like plumbing will still require hands-on labor, the work around them is increasingly vulnerable to AI-driven change—from diagnostics and planning to paperwork and scheduling.

“You’ll still need someone to turn the wrench, no doubt, but the actual process of plumbing and the value that’s added will change a little bit,” O’Donoghue said. “One of the things is the massive integration of AI into manual work—and as we start exploring things like physical AI, it makes things even more complicated.”

Peyovich echoed this view, adding that AI can be used to add value to hands-on work—like improving safety and efficiency. But overall his hope is that the current moment is not a short-lived labor-market quirk, but a longer-term rebalancing of how society values education and work.

“I still hope that in my lifetime people really see [skilled trades] as being just as an attractive track as going through college,” he said.