Aerospace Firms Turn to AI to Address Workforce Shortages

The aerospace and defense industry faces a fundamentally different AI challenge than most of corporate America. Rather than viewing artificial intelligence as a path to workforce reduction, contractors are deploying it as critical infrastructure to address severe talent shortages and meet escalating Pentagon production demands.

The shift reflects mounting pressure on defense contractors to dramatically accelerate manufacturing of missile interceptors, satellites, and other national security systems. According to Clay Mowry, chief executive of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, some companies need to quadruple production capacity—a goal that cannot be met with the available workforce alone.

Why it matters

The Pentagon increasingly treats industrial capacity as a strategic asset in its own right, particularly as competition with China intensifies. The ability to rapidly produce advanced systems at scale has become as critical as the ability to invent them. AI adoption in this context represents a fundamental infrastructure investment rather than a cost-cutting measure, with implications for how quickly the U.S. can field new defense capabilities.

Scaling production in the missile interceptor era

"If you're in the missile interceptor business right now, you've got to scale, and you've got to scale fast," Mowry said at the recent ASCEND conference in Washington, as first reported by SpaceNews. "There is not enough workforce for that. There's not enough people that they think that they could put in those jobs, and so they're all scrambling."

That scramble is driving investment in agentic AI systems—technology capable of working across multiple engineering and manufacturing tasks simultaneously, from design iterations to compliance documentation and production planning. Unlike traditional automation software, these systems can assist with broader workflows that span the entire development cycle.

From concept to deployment

Voyager Technologies exemplifies this approach. The space and defense tech firm has hired experts from industry and government to implement AI-driven workflows across its national security business. At the company's Long Beach, California electronics facility, the team is developing next-generation electronics using agentic AI to compress development timelines.

"It doesn't mean that humans go away," said Matt Magaña, who heads Voyager's defense and national security business. "It's about accelerating the cycle time."

The pressure is particularly acute in space programs, where hardware requires highly specialized expertise and qualification timelines can stretch for years. "Space is now more affordable, but we just can't do it fast enough," Magaña noted.

A structural workforce challenge

Mowry said aerospace and defense executives consistently report they cannot hire enough trained engineers, software developers, and technically specialized manufacturing staff. Many firms compete for the same limited pool of workers with expertise in autonomy, machine learning, and advanced systems integration.

While the industry has invested heavily in digital engineering and simulation tools in recent decades, those systems never fundamentally resolved production bottlenecks. Industry leaders believe AI could prove more transformative because it affects the entire production cycle rather than just the design phase.

For companies under pressure to deliver more satellites, missile-defense systems, and military hardware on compressed timelines, AI is steadily being treated as industrial infrastructure rather than a workforce replacement tool.

These details were first reported by SpaceNews.