Faith Technologies announced a $67.5 million plant in Hendricks County, Indiana, on April 9, 2026. Two hundred jobs by 2027. Five hundred thousand square feet of greenfield capacity coming online faster than the workforce model can fill it. Universities cannot answer the proficiency question at the speed it needs to be answered, and Conexus Indiana's COO, Bryce Carpenter, has the data to prove it.
The capacity is showing up faster than the workforce model
Faith Technologies announced a $67.5 million Hendricks County facility on April 9, 2026. Two hundred jobs by the end of 2027. Five hundred thousand square feet of greenfield capacity at Pittsboro Commerce Park. The investment sits inside a wider pattern. U.S. Steel announced plans to restart the Gary Tin Mill in Northwest Indiana in early 2027. Two hundred twenty-five jobs return. GE Aerospace put $65 million into Indiana plants the week before. Indiana absorbed roughly $29 billion in advanced manufacturing investment in 2024 alone, per Conexus Indiana data.
Employment in that same sector dropped one percent in the same year.
Bryce Carpenter, COO at Conexus Indiana, joined me on the AI Ready Podcast last week. He reframed the paradox. The drop is not about AI displacement. It is about retirement. The average experience within advanced manufacturing and logistics was once thirty years. It is now three. A generation of workers who carried decades of accumulated industry experience are aging out. The workforce replacing them shows up with three years on average.
The capacity is showing up faster than the form that built the workforce can deliver people who can run it. Especially on AI.
Indiana advanced manufacturing and logistics companies. Eighty to eighty-five percent are small to medium businesses. Almost every one runs its own self-funded, self-managed soft-skills development program.
Source: Bryce Carpenter, COO Conexus Indiana, AI Ready Podcast 2026-04-23.The obvious answer keeps not working
The instinct, when capacity outpaces workforce, is to push the work to the universities. Indiana has done that work seriously. Indiana University opened its free GenAI 101 course to anyone worldwide earlier this month. The course has enrolled more than 114,000 students, staff, and faculty since launch. Ivy Tech Community College, the largest community college in the country with nineteen campuses across Indiana, now operates the most operationally aligned AI training program in the state. Bryce called out Ivy Tech by name on the podcast. He was right to.
I taught the first Intro to AI course at Ivy Tech last year and helped design the curriculum. I watched what they built work in a way that other institutions could not match for speed. Bryce was clear about this on the podcast. Companies cannot wait six to twelve months for a hire to be ready to fill a role. They cannot wait four years for a new graduate. AI skills are needed now, by the people already inside the building. Even the best community-college pipeline in the country cannot, on its own, close that gap fast enough for a 100-to-5,000-person company that is making capital decisions today.
Free training is not the bottleneck. Indiana University put GenAI 101 in front of 114,000 people for free. The proficiency gap kept getting wider anyway.
Training is not proficiency. Training is one input. Proficiency is the work changing.
The 9,700 boutique programs that drain the state
Bryce gave me the number that defines the inefficiency.
Indiana has 9,700 advanced manufacturing and logistics companies. Eighty to eighty-five percent of them are small to medium-sized businesses. Almost every one of them has built its own self-funded, self-managed soft-skills development program.
Wildly inefficient when we talk about productivity. And it drains costs that could be reinvested into equipment. It could be reinvested into wages.
His call: we have to find a way to scale that.
Read that again. Nine thousand seven hundred companies in one state are each running their own version of the same program, with no shared standard, no comparable measurement, no way to know whether the worker the company next door is graduating is more or less capable than the one you graduated last quarter. Every CEO is calibrating against a ghost.
There is a separate data point that compounds the problem. A recent survey found that eighty percent of respondents said they were behind their peers on AI. Eighty percent of any group cannot be behind the median. The math does not allow it. What the survey actually measured was isolation. Every CEO calibrated against an imaginary leader who did not exist, in part because there was no shared instrument to calibrate against the actual median.
Two failures, one root cause. No common scale.
Where the closure has to happen instead
The closure has to happen inside the company, against a measurement instrument both leadership and workforce can reference. The university is one input. The trade association is one input. The consultancy is one input. The closure is inside the building, with a scale that travels.
The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency was built for this. Seven defined stages anchored in observable behavior at each level, from first awareness through full operational orchestration. A scale gives a CIO and a COO one number to point at. It gives a CEO an instrument that compares workers across the building, across the plant, across the supply chain. Same scale. Same conversation.
The free assessment at assess.launchready.ai puts an individual on the scale in under ten minutes. Run it across a leadership team and the calibration disagreement gets quantified instead of debated. Run it across a workforce and you have a baseline neither the CIO nor the COO has to defend in a vacuum.
This is the standard the 9,700 boutique programs do not have. It is also the reason a single shared scale collapses the cost of soft-skills development across an entire industry. If every company in Indiana ran the same instrument, the duplication that drains the state would resolve into one comparable benchmark.
The closure starts in the C-suite
The temptation is to push this down to HR or learning and development. The data does not support that move. Grant Thornton's April 2026 AI Impact Survey found CIOs and CTOs say their workforce is 39% AI-ready. COOs at the same companies say 7%. Same survey, same companies, same workforce. A 32-point disagreement inside the same C-suite.
A leadership team that disagrees with itself by 32 points cannot delegate the closure to a sub-function and expect alignment. The closure starts in the C-suite, with a shared instrument both the CIO and the COO can defend in the same board meeting. From there it moves into the plant.
Universities cannot solve this. The 9,700 boutique programs cannot solve this. The market is waiting for someone to install a common scale and run the work against it.
Listen + take the assessment
Bryce Carpenter and I get into all of this on the AI Ready Podcast at 11 AM ET today, live on LinkedIn. Thirty minutes. The replay republishes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube the same afternoon.
The free 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment is at assess.launchready.ai. Under ten minutes. Tells you where your team operates today.
Related reading: The 32-Point Gap Inside Your Own Leadership Team. The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency framework. The White-Collar Factory manifesto.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can universities close the AI proficiency gap?
Universities are one input, not the closure. Even free open-enrollment AI training (such as Indiana University's GenAI 101 with 114,000 enrolled) does not produce proficiency on its own. Training is one input; proficiency is observable change in the work itself, measured against a shared scale.
What is The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency?
A seven-stage scale that anchors AI proficiency in observable worker behavior, from first awareness through full operational orchestration. The scale lets a CIO and a COO see the same number when they look at the same worker. Free assessment at assess.launchready.ai.
Why are 9,700 Indiana manufacturers running their own soft-skills programs?
Per Bryce Carpenter, COO at Conexus Indiana, eighty to eighty-five percent of the 9,700 advanced manufacturing and logistics companies in Indiana are small to medium-sized businesses, each running self-funded soft-skills development. The duplication is wildly inefficient and drains capital from equipment and wages.
Find your AI Proficiency level
The free 7 Levels assessment places you across seven stages of AI capability. Under ten minutes. Research-backed scoring.