Can robots and artificial intelligence solve the issue of a skilled generation nearing retirement?

Some see advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence as a threat to the workforce.

Others see it as an indicator of who and what "got left behind" - and a possible solution to experts aging out of industry.

"In the last 40 years, American innovation has been one of the most extraordinary forces in human history - but it also made a quiet decision," said Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics. "A quiet decision about which problems were worth solving, and the physical world did not make the cut.

"Manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, shipbuilding and steel - these weren't seen as the future; they were seen as the past. So they got left behind."

Loosararian and Gecko investors, employees and clients gathered in the company's North Side headquarters earlier this month for a Jobs, Energy, Defense and Intelligence (JEDI) forum largely focused on a future workforce driven by AI and robotics.

Among the discussion topics: an aging workforce, a younger generation lacking expertise in industries largely siloed from tech innovation and the fear of AI and robots taking over jobs and making expertise obsolete.

Gecko - which uses robots to inspect infrastructure such as bridges and ship hulls and then transforms millions of bot-collected data into 3D models for clients, including the U.S. Navy - sees itself as part of the solution.

Collecting new data with robots and digitizing existing data can help preserve institutional knowledge, while robotic inspection and AI-powered 3D modeling can remove humans from dangerous, confined, volatile spaces, all while speeding up processes for backlogged inspection experts.

As for robots taking over jobs?

Speakers at the forum were adamant that the robotics-and-AI advancements will take care of the "dull, dirty, dangerous" aspects of work and free up humans to attend to human-centric problems.

"There were no hackathons to help steelmakers produce better steel" or for power plants to operate more efficiently, Loosararian said.

"While the world was changing around new technology, they were expected to show up every single day and keep their jobs the same way - their knowledge, their skill, and their decades of hard-won experience never invested in and never brought forward into the modern era," he said. "That was a historic mistake."

‘A pile of disconnected data'

Mark Dobler, CEO of NAES Power Contractors, which manages over 60 gigawatts of generating power across the U.S., said the need to modernize power plants with robotics and AI insights is urgent - and that retaining the expertise to make it possible is even more so.

"We're in the middle of a skilled labor shortage, unlike anything I've seen in my career," Dobler said. "Twenty-five percent of my workforce will be getting into the retirement bracket in the next five years. The knowledge walkout is real, and it's accelerating, and we must capture this knowledge before it leaves the industry."

He described a late night crisis at one of NAES's plants.

It was 3 a.m. and a cooling water pump had tripped. The plant was down.

The control room operator called the on-duty electrician.

One problem: "The one person that truly understood that [equipment], he retired six months ago," Dobler said. Instead, a 22-year-old operator, six months on the job, took eight hours trying to troubleshoot and find the blown fuse with "his cellphone in his hand" and "a handful of documents."

One of Dobler's presentation slides summed up the situation: "ASSETS ARE AGING. EXPERTS ARE RETIRING. DEMAND IS SPIKING."

"This isn't a one-facility problem; it's not even a one company problem," Dobler said. "For an industry that has built its knowledge base in the heads of people who are now retiring, [we are now] handing the next generation a pile of disconnected data and telling them, do your best."

Using AI and robots to empower human workers

Capturing institutional knowledge as data - digital records that are plain-language searchable - is what Gecko said it aims to do. JEDI speakers repeated their central process: Capture ground truth. Contextualize it. Enable action.

Doug Philippone proposed AI as an elevating tool for the workforce.

Philippone served in the military before leading defense at tech giant Palantir for 17 years, then founding the investment firm Snowpoint Ventures.

"How do you use the AI to empower people to move up the chain?" Philippone asked. "You get basically untrained workers with a high school education, who can now do complicated maintenance on a factory, they can be maintenance on an aircraft, et cetera, in ways that they couldn't before."

Earlier this year, Washington-based NAES and Gecko announced a multi-year partnership valued at more than $100 million - with the possibility of growing to $250 million - with one focus: modernizing power plants.

When NAES brought in Boston Dynamics' robotic dog to help with inspections, workers were skeptical and worried about their jobs, said Nancy Armstrong, NAES's technical program director of energy and robotics.

Armstrong explained to them that the robot dog was intended to take on the mundane, repetitive tasks of their jobs, not replace them.

"Very quickly it became kind of like just part of the fabric of the plant," she said. "They started to see it more as a tool and less as a threat."

Adopting tech will determine ‘winners and losers'

The work doesn't go away, said Bob Hippard, senior manager of inspection at Canadian fertilizer company Nutrien. Rather, "it transforms, so that tech does the heavy lifting."

And in an industry dealing with "nasty" chemicals contained in spaces "no human would want to work in," he said it was imperative for inspections to be done by robots.

"In my career, every facility I've worked at, there has been a death. At every. Last. One." Hippard said with a somber tone. "Humans are more important."

It's why Loosararian started Gecko in 2013, after visiting a power plant in Oil City, Venango County, and hearing about a person who died inspecting a persistent, unpredictable explosion issue.

Gecko said its various software offerings help address the aging workforce problem by digitizing documents and mapping and contextualizing data that often sit collecting dust in boxes stored in remote archives.

"After all the work that goes into putting [records] together - the inspections, the certifications, the reports of approvals - this record goes into a salt mine [archive]," Gecko engineer Connor Hazen said. "Protected, yes, but almost impossible to use when we actually need it. This is not industrial intelligence, it's archived evidence."

Another Gecko robotic system uses cameras to 3D scan parts and identify flaws before installation, as opposed to an inspector going over every inch with a flashlight, paper and pencil, and mapping out flaws on a 2D sketch.

And because of the high demand and short supply of such experts, Gecko engineers said, inspectors' workloads are backed up.

When they put an expert up against the robot, the expert inspector took four hours, while Gecko took 30 minutes to inspect and then render a model that can be accessed and updated digitally for the rest of the part's lifespan, the company said.

Being able to access a facility's past knowledge, contextualize its data and refer to dynamic 3D models of infrastructure is nothing short of the determiner between "winners and losers." Loosararian said.

"It's not a ‘Do I want to adopt technology' question.' It is ‘I have to adopt technology, or I will not make it.' That's the reality that we're moving into."

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This story was originally published June 22, 2026 at 8:06 AM.