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AI will infiltrate the industrial workforce in 2026—let’s apply it to training the next generation, not replacing them

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A silent crisis is shaking the very foundations of modern society.

The industrial workforce responsible for building the global economy is at risk of crumbling. The people charged with keeping our power grids online, factories humming, utilities reliable, and supply chains moving uninterrupted are retiring at a fast clip. Sure, this may seem like the natural cycle of things as mass retirement opens the door to at least 3.8 million jobs. But it hides a deeply troubling reality: tacit knowledge, along with practical skills refined over decades of hands-on work, is at risk of leaving with them. 

While technologies from artificial intelligence to robotics to computer vision are transforming industrial operations, we’re dangerously close as a society to losing the ability to diagnose a failing motor by sound, read analog engineering drawings, or understand the quirks of a 60-year-old machine that predates Disco. 

This kind of expertise is rarely written down in one place and always valuable, especially when there’s a mechanical issue or system-level disruption. Meanwhile, generative AI is making information feel instantly available. 

The tension here is real and consequential. The question facing junior industrial professionals across industries, from heavy manufacturing to utilities to supply chain: If software can answer questions in seconds, why spend years learning by doing (and, in some cases, failing)?

When it comes to industrial operations, the answer is actually quite simple. We can’t afford to lose earned knowledge or train a workforce that uses AI without understanding the system it supports from soup to nuts. 

The opportunity with investing in AI is to preserve the knowledge needed to keep lights on, factories humming, and society moving, and apply it at scale. Success requires keeping pace with gen AI advancements while adapting to macro factors and global challenges that come in waves. This opens the door wider for AI working with humans (and vice versa) to build resilience into essential industries powering the world’s economy for decades to come.

AI’s Elevated Role: Not On Autopilot

Industry runs on machinery and management making the right calls. Consistently. Confidently. But it’s not that simple.

Across the industrial economy, it’s common for a small group of experienced workers to serve as keepers of an outsized amount of knowledge. They know which vibration or clanking noise spells trouble, which workaround keeps production going during a shortage, and which drawing accurately reflects the latest hardware installments in the field.

At the same time, many companies still operate using a patchwork of small group expertise, spreadsheets, and fragmented databases requiring manual collation. When one system goes down or an expert retires (or, frankly, is out sick), it’s nearly impossible to answer simple questions like: what parts do we have, which assets matter most, or where is money being wasted?

These aren’t small businesses or Mom and Pop shops. Manufacturing giants, automobile OEMs, fleet management companies, utilities, and defense contractors are among the collection of expertise-dependent organizations primed for AI support. Every organization is different but they encounter the same critical problem that AI can help solve: data is everywhere, it’s fragmented or siloed, and organizing it requires plumbing every system and file repository to combine relevant information. Humans can collate and organize data collections in weeks or months with a dedicated effort. Today’s AI, meanwhile, can organize data deluges in minutes or hours.

Trade Painstaking Decisions for Decision Intelligence

The other driving factor: Industrial work is full of tradeoffs. Factory managers, technicians, floor mechanics, and engineers are constantly faced with dilemmas: fix or replace, act now or wait, cut costs or reduce risk, maximize uptime or meet sustainability goals. These decisions affect millions of assets and must be made under regulatory scrutiny, often with incomplete information. AI helps people make better decisions, not turn on autopilot and zone out.

AI is good at pulling together signals from various sources and making sense of them in a way that humans understand immediately, such as maintenance history, sensor data, demand forecasts, market conditions, and environmental risks. When used well, AI can help teams plan, predict, and prioritize. AI backstops human judgment. With the available tech, neither human or machine should be left to their own devices.

This ability to support decision-making goes beyond convenience or cost efficiency. It’s a powerful industrial asset as power grids, utilities, and manufacturers face unprecedented demands from electrification, data center growth and expansion, and full-scale automation. AI can help spot problems earlier, justify investment choices, and safely extend the life of aging equipment. That is not automation for its own sake. It is about keeping essential systems reliable.

AI: A Workforce Equalizer for Trade and Technical Work

Younger workers (18-35) are often criticized for relying too much on technology, or expected to do so when a system falters or machinery requires maintenance. In reality, they want tools that help them do meaningful work safely and efficiently.  

Younger workers are also among the first groups to fully embrace that AI advances insanely fast. The tech available today is good enough to accurately reflect seasoned experience, shorten learning curves, and close talent gaps with near-instant, but verified and context-rich data gleaned from real-world work. 

Why that matters: AI can demolish the barrier to entry to industrial jobs without neutering the skills required to do the job. Younger pros benefit from AI’s ability to dramatically reduce time spent mining for information or wrestling with fragmented systems. AI actually renders jobs more technical and more rewarding. Both appealing to younger workforce members.

Industrial roles from field service manager to HVAC technician to factory shift worker keep the world running, yet they are often misrepresented as tech-agnostic or low-skill. In reality, they require deep expertise and a variety of skill sets. Across the industrial economy, AI is poised to accelerate skills training ten-fold and open the door for a new generation of industrial pros to step in—and here’s the important bit—without sacrificing quality, let alone imploding the entire system.

We’re seeing vocational programs at community college enrollment numbers tick up, increasing 16% in 2025 compared to last year. This is a signal that Gen Z is open-minded and ready to take on blue collar work in favor of desk jobs. It’s also evidence that AI is not only serving as an equalizer, but actively reshaping and advancing blue collar’s next generation.

Embrace AI as a Workforce Asset, Or Lose Everything

While industrial AI is just beginning to enter mainstream conversations thanks to, for example, $61B in data center contracts in 2025 alone and a buzzy race to collect GPUs for full-scale AI deployments in the physical world, the window to act is already closing. I estimate we have 1-2 years left to capture decades of industrial knowledge in AI applications and front-edge tech platforms supported by AI on the backend, or we lose it. Everything.

The industrial economy operates in the real world, with communities around the globe relying on it for jobs, electricity, and much more. People building AI to meet unprecedented demand need to ship practical tools that respect human experience, support better decisions, and make complex systems easier to understand—whether you’ve been on the job for four weeks or 40 years. Industrial operations are deeply technical, nuanced, and complex. AI alone can’t do the work at scale. Systems need industry-rich context and informed prompts from human counterparts to produce outcomes that solve problems and stand the test of time.

AI can (and should) be applied to industrial operations in an authoritative, but supporting role across sectors and specific use cases. 

But industry must adopt innovation that preserves nuance, predictive maintenance inclinations, and incident-specific experience only possible from years of hands-on work. That’s how we add resilience to global operations. To do this in hours and days, not months, we need both AI and people. I’m optimistic that AI won’t hollow out the industrial workforce. In fact, incorporating AI at scale to support a younger workforce may be the only way to sustain it.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Want to be an NFL coach? It’s America’s hottest job opening right now and pays up to $20 million with no college degree required

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January 15, 2026

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Move over AI engineers and management consultants—America’s hottest job opening right now isn’t sitting in a cubicle in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. It’s on the sidelines of the nation’s favorite sport.

Nine NFL franchises are actively looking for new head coaches, triggering one of the most competitive—and unforgiving—hiring cycles in the U.S. labor market. The job offers eye-popping pay, unmatched visibility, and authority over billion-dollar enterprises. It also comes with a catch: failure is public, fast, and often final.

There’s no formal degree required, though playing college football is often a rite of passage. You’ll need to relocate, but you have your pick of major cities around the country. The travel schedule is intense, though you’ll never have to fly economy. And while contracts vary, it’s safe to say the role all but guarantees millionaire status—assuming you negotiate well and last long enough to collect.

This year’s openings include the Baltimore Ravens, Atlanta Falcons, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers, Miami Dolphins, Las Vegas Raiders, Cleveland Browns, Tennessee Titans, and Arizona Cardinals—each betting that the right hire can quickly change the trajectory of their franchise.

“Success is situational in this league,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay. “Sure, you need some ingenuity and some luck, and that five-year plan you’ve sketched out is adorable, but what you really need is an organization that runs more capably than an eighth grade carwash. There aren’t many.”

That reality may explain why America’s hottest job is also among the most unstable—and why so many teams are back on the market again.

Coach salaries have risen from $300K to $6 million a year—but you’ll need to prove your passion for the job decades before

Unsurprisingly, the road to becoming an NFL head coach usually begins decades before the first contract negotiation. 

Most coaches develop an early passion for the sport, often playing football in high school or college before finding a foothold on a professional staff. From there, the climb resembles a corporate ladder: entry-level roles, years of apprenticeship, and frequent job changes—often requiring a move to an entirely new city every few seasons.

Take Mike McDaniel, the recently fired Miami Dolphins head coach. After being a player at Yale, he began his post-college career as a coaching intern in 2005. He spent nearly two decades rotating through assistant roles across multiple franchises before landing his first head coaching job in 2022. On the flip side, Todd Haley, the former head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, never played football in high school or college—yet still reached the league’s top coaching tier.

However varied the path, the payoff at the top is substantial. 

Over the last few decades, coaches have become more like assets to franchises—and thus their average salaries have risen from $300,000 to $6 million a year, according to data compiled by Sportico and Pro Football Reference reported by The New York Times.

At the very top of the market, pay climbs much higher. Current Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, the league’s highest-paid coach, earns an estimated $20 million per year. Contracts also might include performance incentives tied to benchmarks such as playoff appearances or Super Bowl runs.

But that compensation comes with significant risk. The extreme job insecurity and high probability of public failure makes high salaries operate as a form of “hazard pay,” according to Minjung Kim, an assistant professor of sport management at Texas A&M University.

“While head coaches gain significant brand value and visibility, they operate in environments where performance is evaluated publicly, timelines are highly compressed, and job security is often shaped by factors beyond their direct control, such as injuries, roster construction, or organizational instability,” she told Fortune.

“High compensation reflects the intensity of the role but does not eliminate its volatility, underscoring how inherently unstable and demanding these positions are.”

How the expectations of an NFL head coach compare to being a top CEO

At its core, the head coach job is simple: win football games. But in practice, coaches are expected to act as the ultimate motivator, recruiter, and tactician—while serving as the first and loudest recipient of blame when things go wrong.

The effectiveness of a head coach has shifted in recent years from being judged primarily by their charisma, intuition, and coaching staff to what Kim calls the “coaching intelligence triad”: having cultural, digital, and emotional intelligence.

“In contemporary sport organizations, head coaches must lead diverse groups, integrate data and technology into fast decision-making processes, and regulate emotions under intense pressure,” she told Fortune.

Oftentimes, the skills needed to be a successful coach are equated to those of a CEO.

“Like CEOs, [coaches] should be concerned with long-term strategic planning and decision-making, managing the cultural and emotional well-being of the team and acting as the face of the organization,” wrote sports commentator and former NFL player Domonique Foxworth. “Those things don’t sound like coaching, but they have as much of an impact on a team’s success as game planning.”

Failure to take stock of the bigger picture responsibilities can ultimately lead to indecisiveness at important moments, disgruntled players, and harmful leaks to the media, Foxworth said.

“Too many head coaches underestimate the importance of their new CEO duties and focus on the side of the ball that brought them success,” Foxworth added. “The impact of that on a team is not unlike what happens in other organizations: There is no strategic cohesion, long-term awareness and a culture of apathy develops.”

Kim echoed that modern head coaches and corporate executives both need a clear vision and adaptability. Yet the relentless scrutiny week after week makes sports leadership “one of the most visible and psychologically demanding forms of organizational leadership today.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Trump’s ‘Department of War’ rebrand could cost $125 million, says the CBO

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January 15, 2026

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President Trump’s bid to knock four letters off the “Department of Defense” in a rebrand to the “Department of War” could cost upwards of $100 million, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated.

On September 5, the president signed an executive order to restore the George Washington-era names of the Department of War and the Office of the Secretary of War as secondary titles for the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Within that order was a stipulation that the Secretary of War would later submit a presidential application to permanently change the name of the department.

However, rebranding the nation’s biggest employer is no small task. The Pentagon oversees 1.32 million people in active duty and 750,000 civilian personnel.

According to the CBO, which responded to a request for information from senators Jeff Merkley and Chuck Schumer, the shift would cost about $10 million for a “modest implementation” of the change, primarily within the department itself. This sum could be absorbed as an opportunity cost, the CBO added, paid out of existing budgets.

But there are two ends to the scale: Minimal implementation might cost a measly few million, the CBO said, but on the extreme end it could cost taxpayers $125 million.

“Broadly, the costs would include staff time spent updating document templates, revising websites, or modifying letterhead, time that could be devoted to the activities that the department had planned to conduct before the executive order was issued,” the CBO wrote. “Similarly, funds used for signage or ceremonial items could reduce resources available for planned items or activities.”

The scale of the costs depends on how “aggressively” the rebrand is rolled out, and how it would be prioritized against remaining activities and “ongoing missions.” A more aggressive rollout, for example, might include “immediately replacing stationery, signage, and nameplates” as opposed to replacing them when existing stock runs out.

“The faster the changes were implemented, the more parts of DoD that the changes applied to, and the more complete the renaming, the costlier it would be,” the CBO added.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the now aptly-named Department of War is refocused on readiness and lethality—and its title now reflects its status as the most powerful fighting force in the world,” the White House told Fortune. “The White House is working hand-in-glove with the Department of War on implementation of the executive order.”

One of the most expensive endeavours in the proposed change would be renaming the air bases. Even back in March 2023, the Army projected that it would cost at least $39 million to rename nine posts: Forts AP Hill, Benning, Bragg, Gordon, Hood, Lee, Pickett, Polk, and Rucker. That was nearly double an estimate by the Naming Commission a year prior, which put the price at $21 million.

There are also costs incurred for other non-federal entities if the Department of War decides to push its name change through as a blanket approach. For example, the CBO points out that North Carolina spent $400,000 in 2023 to change the name of Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty, just to change it back to Fort Bragg again last summer.



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How to get $20 account credit for Verizon outage

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January 15, 2026

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Verizon says it will offer $20 account credits to 1.5 million customers affected by a widespread network outage that left users without service for up to 10 hours Wednesday, even as the company continues to be cryptic about what actually caused the outage. 

In a statement to Fortune Wednesday, the communications giant acknowledged the scale of the failure and apologized to customers, calling the outage a lapse in its own standards.

“Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence our customers expect and that we expect of ourselves,” a Verizon spokesperson told Fortune. The company said affected customers can redeem the $20 credit through the MyVerizon app, noting “on average, this covers multiple days of service.” Business customers, Verizon added, will be contacted directly about credits.

Verizon stressed the credit was not intended to be full compensation for the outage—”no credit really can” make up for it, they wrote. But they encouraged customers still experiencing problems to restart their devices in order to reconnect to the network. 

Despite the apology, Verizon did not say whether the outage stemmed from a technical failure or a broader systems issue, fueling speculation and frustration online. 

One widely shared post on X featured a user threatening to cancel their Verizon plan outright. 

“[T]hey can have this phone back,” the user wrote in a post that racked up more than 1 million views.

Rival carriers were quick to seize the moment. AT&T replied directly to the post, promoting its wireless free-trial program. The original poster responded minutes later asking for help switching plans.

Data from Downdetector showed a sharp spike in outage reports beginning early Wednesday and persisting throughout the day, with the highest concentration of complaints coming from major metro areas including New York City, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia. Roughly 60% of reported issues involved mobile-phone service, followed by loss of signal and mobile internet disruptions.

The outage also arrives just months after Verizon announced the largest layoffs in its history. In November 2025, the company said it would cut roughly 15,000 jobs as part of a restructuring effort. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said at the time the reductions were necessary to reduce “complexity and friction that slow us down and frustrate our customers.”

It remains unclear whether the workforce reductions had any role in Tuesday’s outage or the company’s ability to resolve it quickly.



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