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Alok Chanani is the co-founder and CEO of BuildOps, a software platform for commercial and industrial service contractors. The opinions are the author’s own.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has quietly admitted what many of us already knew: The job math in Texas is broken.
In their October 2025 Southwest Economythe Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas stated that the decline in international migration is reducing job growth across the state of Texas. And for those who work in Texas construction: 40% of whom are immigrants — The loss of international migrant workers is not a “headwind”. It is a structural failure.
For decades, the U.S. construction industry has relied on a steady flow of foreign-born labor to replace an aging workforce. This pipeline has now been reduced.
Meanwhile, demand soars. Because of the infrastructure bill, the reorientation of manufacturing, and the rush to build high-energy data centers to fuel the AI boom, there is more work than ever.
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Elected officials can argue about immigration policies until they’re blue in the face. However, contractors with net profit margins of less than 3% cannot afford to wait for Washington to solve border problems or for local high schools to produce master electricians.
The reality we face is stark: We won’t have enough people to build the future we design.
The industry has exactly one short-term solution: we need to significantly increase the productivity of the people we currently have. This is when the AI conversation typically devolves into “innovation theater” about robots building brick walls or 3D printed skyscrapers.
But let’s forget science fiction. The real benefit of AI in the physical world is not to replace workers; is to compress the experience.
The gap of 20 years
The only thing keeping our customers awake at night is not the rising price of steel; is the so-called silver tsunami. All the master technicians, the people who can listen to the dashboard of a hospital refrigerator and tell you exactly which valve is loose, are retiring.
When they leave, they take decades of institutional knowledge with them. We replace them with 24-year-old apprentices who are willing to learn but lack experience. In the past, it took fifteen years to turn that apprentice into a master technician. We are not fifteen years old anymore.
This is the concrete and practical issue that AI addresses.
Young techies are using AI as a “force multiplier” in the field. When they take a photo of a serial number on a rusted rooftop air conditioning unit, AI can pull up the owner’s manual, identify error codes, and summarize the repair history of the past five years.
As a result, a technician with two years of experience can troubleshoot a job with the confidence of someone much more experienced.
Using AI does not make the job “easier”. Construction remains physically demanding and dangerous. However, AI bridges the knowledge gap. Contractors can now send a junior technician on a critical job without worrying about losing a lot of money due to a catastrophic error.
Survival math
Tech pundits like to talk about AI in terms of “disruptors.” However, for people and businesses running electrical, plumbing and mechanical businesses, it’s all about survival math.
Construction is a business with thin margins and extreme risk. If a project’s schedule slips because you couldn’t locate a crew or had to do a “rework” because a junior technician made a mistake, your margins disappear.
Due to the decrease in immigration, the cost of labor will increase. Supply and demand dictate. If you can’t hire additional staff, you need to get 20% or 30% more income from the crews you already have.
As a result, contractors must eliminate the administrative waste that currently plagues the trades. Technicians will no longer wait for shipping codes. Handwritten invoices lost in the cabs of trucks will cease to exist. Contractors need to digitize workflows so humans can focus on “turnkey time.”
A revolution in helmets
It’s ironic that engineers have been able to train AI on how to create poetry or pass the bar exam. Meanwhile, from my point of view, the most significant economic impacts of this technology are occurring in the machine rooms and on the construction sites.
Blue-collar workers, who have historically been underserved by technology, are adopting AI solutions at a faster rate than white-collar middle management. Why? Because the benefits of AI are undeniable. They don’t care about the hype cycle. They want to complete the job and go home to their families.
The Dallas Fed report should serve as a wake-up call. The easy growth generated by cheap and abundant immigrant labor is slowing. We are entering a period of labor shortage.
We can’t program our way out of the electrician shortage. AI can’t pull wires or weld pipes. However, if we stop focusing on vanity metrics and focus on how to apply AI to solve real-world problems, it can give us the time we need to train the next generation of builders.
The labor crisis is here. The immigration cavalry is not coming. And the people who hold this country together cannot fight this battle with clipboards and guesswork. It will take technology in their hands, powered by AI, to help them win.
