When Bryce Carpenter sits at the head of a quarterly meeting with 140 advanced manufacturing and logistics companies in Indiana, he sees a pattern most outside observers miss. He is the COO of Conexus Indiana, founded the Advanced Industries Council in 2019, and convenes 120-plus industry partners four times a year across the most manufacturing-intensive state in the country.
I sat down with him on April 23 for the AI Ready Podcast. The conversation ran 36 minutes, covered the digital-adoption-meets-workforce convergence, the actual state of AI inside Indiana manufacturing, what the colleges can and cannot do at speed, and the one stat from a recent industry survey that, when you do the math, cannot logically be true. The full episode broadcast LinkedIn Live on April 29.
What follows is the edited interview. Four themes pulled from the conversation, key moments selected and shaped for skim readers, organized so a busy executive can read it in seven minutes and walk away with the through-line.
The through-line: workforce readiness in the AI era cannot be solved by the institutions producing the workforce, on the timeline the companies need it. The companies are doing the work themselves, at scale, every one of them building their own program. That is the real problem. The companies are not behind so much as they have no way to measure where they actually are, and so they assume the worst.
Watch the full episode here, then read on.
The 80% math problem
I asked Bryce, near the end of the conversation, to grade Indiana on its AI progress. One letter grade, one to one hundred, A through F. He gave the state an A-minus. I told him I would have given it a B or B-minus. The reason he chose the higher grade is the load-bearing read of the entire interview.
Q: What grade would you put on where we are right now as the industry in this state with AI? What's our report card?
A: I'm going to give us an A-minus, which you're going to say is probably overly charitable, but I'm going to tell you why I say that.
80% of respondents said that they were behind on AI, their peers in industry. 80% of people can't be behind the median point of industry. So I think everybody feels like they're behind and are overestimating what everybody else is doing.
So it creates this tendency of, I'm so far behind, my goodness, this state, this company has it all figured out. 80% of people can't be behind.
Q: When you talk to CEOs around the state, what is actually happening on the ground with AI right now?
A: The sense we get is that most folks are in the experimentation phase. We've got a great board of directors we work closely with. This was the topic of discussion at our board of directors meeting in February. The general consensus, amongst some of the larger companies in the state, is they are still trying things out and seeing what has the biggest impact.
One company is really looking at AI right now, experimenting in HR, trying to find some efficiencies on documentation and employee management. They've gone as far as looking at compensation, basing their compensation rates versus the market. There's a lot they've been able to do that saves a lot of money on data sets that had to be purchased, very expensive data sets over the years.
Other companies have a Copilot sandbox. A subscription for everyone on the team. Once a week they meet as a group, and they see what's the most compelling use case that one of the employees has identified to make their work more efficient.
Your big, big companies, the Lillies of the world, the Cummins of the world, what they're doing is working through a global footprint of machines bought at different life cycles and different portions of the world, working through how they can get data harmony across such a multinational supply chain.
"80% of respondents said that they were behind on AI, their peers in industry. 80% of people can't be behind the median point of industry."
The 80% number measures how exposed CEOs feel to a story nobody has handed them an instrument to evaluate against, not where companies actually are. That is a different problem, and it has a different solution.
Companies are running their own soft-skills programs because nobody else will
The conversation turned to what is actually being trained. I had asked about the Indiana split between the 8% of the manufacturing workforce in tech-enabled positions versus 10% nationally, and where the training shortfall sits.
Bryce's answer named what was actually happening. The training is occurring. It is occurring at every single company, in parallel, at scale, and it is the wrong layer to be solving from.
Q: Most of the training I see across the industry is tool-based. How do you see this rolling out across these bigger corporations? Where are the positives and where are the weaknesses?
A: There are positives and weaknesses in sort of the same thing, which is the larger companies are always going to be the test case. A company like Endress+Hauser has such a well-built system around engaging students at the middle-school level to drive exposure and career development.
Companies are owning a lot of the soft-skill development you're referencing there. And the educational system has been focused on the tools.
It's great that the soft skills are being taught, [but] when every single company has to have their own self-funded, self-managed soft-skill development program, that's wildly inefficient when we talk about productivity. And it drains costs that could be reinvested into equipment. It could be reinvested into wages.
It's an inefficient system where if we're saying we have 9,700 advanced manufacturing and logistics companies in the state, and 9,700 of them have to have their own boutique soft-skills development programs. So it's great that they're doing it. We have to find a way to scale that.
Q: When you talk to those CEOs about what their digital-adoption investments now require of their workforce, has that thinking changed in the last two years?
A: They do not view investments into digital adoption as bifurcated from workforce needs.
For a long time, we had parallel streams. Let's talk about the need for digitization and equipment and throughput and all of these things. And then let's talk about our workforce needs, pipelines of young workers, reskilled, upskilling, et cetera.
Within the last 18 months, digital-adoption investments are not thought about without what is the implications on the workforce? What's the acceptance rate? What's the perception of putting this piece of equipment or this AI tool in? What does it do from a skills perspective, redeploying my current workforce?
You invest in digital technologies to augment your workforce, but they have to remain connected at all times.
Indiana has 9,700 manufacturing and logistics companies. Roughly 80 to 85% of them are small-to-medium-sized businesses, multi-generational shops working hard to meet customer demand. None of them want to be running their own soft-skills development program. They are doing it because nobody else is moving fast enough to do it for them.
What Indiana actually looks like
Most of the AI workforce conversation in 2026 is national. That is a category mistake when you operate inside a single state. The Indiana numbers tell a specific story, and Bryce had the specific numbers.
Q: Walk me through the scale of advanced manufacturing in Indiana for someone who doesn't live inside this industry.
A: We're the most manufacturing-intensive state in the country. Indiana is more dependent on advanced manufacturing and logistics than Hawaii is on tourism.
[Harrison: For listeners who want the numbers, advanced manufacturing and logistics in Indiana is 840,000 jobs. That is 25% of our state workforce. When you look at state GDP, that is 37% of GDP.]
The Future Ready Report projects 178,000 new advanced manufacturing and logistics jobs by 2033, and 85,000 of those are going unfilled.
Indiana jobs in advanced manufacturing and logistics. 25% of state workforce. 37% of state GDP. Most manufacturing-intensive state in the country.
Source: State of Indiana labor data, cited on AI Ready Podcast, April 2026Q: How do you see AI showing up in manufacturing right now in a way that's actually working?
A: One way that we're seeing it the most quickly right now is defect inspection. Vision systems to identify minor defects, microscopic defects before a product ever leaves the company.
We work closely with an automotive OEM manufacturer. At one point, they had 600 welders. All welding is done by robots right now. Those 600 welders remained employed within that automotive manufacturer. They were taught new skills and they were redeployed through different roles within the company because that automotive manufacturer fought really hard to get those 600 people in the building when they were welders.
The 600 welders are the answer to every CEO who has been told AI means workforce reduction. That is not what is actually happening inside the operations of the largest manufacturers in this state. The math problem is not "how many jobs go away." It is "how do we reskill the people we already have on staff fast enough to meet 178,000 new openings, 85,000 of which already cannot be filled."
The aging-out read
This was the moment in the conversation I leaned forward. Bryce said one sentence that should be in every Indiana CEO's deck the next time they present an AI investment to their board.
Q: Connexus's own data says Indiana had $29 billion in advanced manufacturing investment in 2024 but employment in that sector dropped by 1%. So when you look at the companies putting the money in, what is the honest explanation for why the jobs didn't follow?
A: What I think does not appear in the data but that we hear anecdotally is it's the people aging out and retiring. And it's the investment into digital adoption to keep up or stay close to the workforce levels needed.
The average experience within advanced manufacturing and logistics was once 30 years. It's now three. Because of how the ages in the workforce, how many of those folks, exacerbated by all the challenges of the last five years, have retired and have left the facilities.
I don't believe from what we see and what we hear that there's a direct line between investments in digital adoption and reductions in headcount. I think that companies are having to make more accelerated investments in digital adoption to maintain some semblance of the overall capacity that they need to compete.
"The average experience within advanced manufacturing and logistics was once 30 years. It's now three."
This is the read that has been missing from the AI conversation in this state. The Indiana manufacturing CEO is not facing an AI displacement problem. The Indiana manufacturing CEO is facing a 30-years-to-3-years experience compression problem, and AI is one of the few tools fast enough to address it inside the operating window the business actually has.
Editorial close
I left the conversation thinking about the 80% number. It was not the most quotable line of the interview. It was the most honest one.
When Bryce said, "80% of people can't be behind the median point of industry," he was not making a clever statistical observation. He was naming the actual problem the most-manufacturing-intensive state in the country is solving for. CEOs feel behind because they are pattern-matching against Lilly and Cummins and the loudest voices on social media. The companies that should be their reference points, the 9,700 small and mid-sized manufacturers running similar operations across Indiana, are not comparing notes openly. So every CEO assumes everyone else is further along.
That is a measurement problem. It is not a capability problem. The capability is there. The reskilling is happening. The defect-inspection vision systems are running. The 600 welders kept their jobs and learned new skills. None of it is showing up in any aggregated measurement most leaders can read.
Workforce readiness in the AI era cannot be solved by the institutions producing the workforce, on the timeline the companies need it. The colleges, even the best of them, cannot move at the speed of the technology. Bryce was generous about Ivy Tech, and rightly so. They are the fastest-moving community college system in the country. They still cannot run a four-year cycle when the tools change every six months.
What is missing is an instrument. A measurement layer the companies can use to read where their own teams actually sit, against a published standard, in under ten minutes, before they hire a consultant or buy a curriculum or sign a vendor contract. Something that closes the question "how far behind am I" with a real number, instead of a vibe.
If you want to see where your team actually sits, the free 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment is the place to start. It is the measurement layer Bryce was describing. Built by LaunchReady, validated against the human cognitive and emotional skills that compound with AI capability, takes under ten minutes per person, and the result is a number, not a vibe.
The 80% number is a story leaders tell themselves because nobody has handed them a real instrument to measure against. The real instrument is one click away.
Related reading: vinyl and the value of humans in the AI era (the thesis pillar that pairs with this case study), the 80% shortfall: what companies should learn from higher ed, the 7 Levels of AI Proficiency framework.
Sources
- AI Ready Podcast, "Why 80% of Indiana CEOs Feel Behind on AI." Episode with Bryce Carpenter. Recorded April 23, 2026. Broadcast LinkedIn Live April 29, 2026. youtube.com/watch?v=scFpXYDRiSs
- Bryce Carpenter, Chief Operating Officer, Conexus Indiana. Founded the Advanced Industries Council in 2019. conexusindiana.com
- Conexus Indiana. "Future Ready Report." Cited statistics on 178,000 projected new advanced manufacturing and logistics jobs in Indiana by 2033 and 85,000 unfilled.
- Conexus Indiana. "2025 Year in Review." Cited statistic on Indiana 2024 advanced manufacturing investment of $29 billion and 1% sector-employment decline.
- State of Indiana labor data. Advanced manufacturing and logistics workforce of 840,000 representing 25% of state workforce and 37% of state GDP.
- The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment. LaunchReady AI. assess.launchready.ai
Frequently asked questions
Who is Bryce Carpenter?
Bryce Carpenter is the Chief Operating Officer of Conexus Indiana and the founder of the Advanced Industries Council, which he started in 2019. The council convenes 120-plus industry partners and 140 companies four times a year, focused on digital adoption inside Indiana's advanced manufacturing and logistics sector.
What is the 80% statistic Bryce cites?
In a recent industry survey, 80% of respondents said they were behind on AI relative to their peers. Bryce's read: 80% of people cannot be behind the median by definition. The number measures perceived exposure, not actual position. CEOs are pattern-matching against the largest, loudest companies and assuming they are five years behind when they are running similar pilots to peers their own size.
How big is advanced manufacturing in Indiana?
Advanced manufacturing and logistics in Indiana is 840,000 jobs, 25% of the state workforce, and 37% of state GDP. Indiana is more dependent on advanced manufacturing and logistics than Hawaii is on tourism. The Future Ready Report projects 178,000 new sector jobs by 2033, with 85,000 already projected to go unfilled.
Why are Indiana manufacturers running their own soft-skills programs?
Bryce's view: the educational system has focused on tools, so companies have absorbed the soft-skills training themselves. With 9,700 advanced manufacturing and logistics companies in Indiana, that means 9,700 self-funded, self-managed boutique programs running in parallel. Wildly inefficient. Bryce frames this as a scale problem requiring a new model that pairs education with employer-defined skills outcomes.
Is AI displacing Indiana manufacturing workers?
Bryce's read: no, retirement is. Average sector experience has fallen from 30 years to three years per worker. Indiana saw $29 billion in advanced manufacturing investment in 2024 with a 1% employment decline, and Bryce attributes the decline to retirement, not AI displacement. The 600-welder example: when one OEM moved to robotic welding, all 600 welders kept their jobs and were retrained for new roles.
How can a company measure where its team actually sits on AI?
The free 7 Levels of AI Proficiency assessment at assess.launchready.ai places each respondent on a seven-stage proficiency scale, from Cadet through Mission Director, in under ten minutes. The framework anchors AI capability in human cognitive and emotional skills. It is the kind of measurement layer Bryce was describing in the interview.
Find your AI Proficiency level
The free 7 Levels assessment places you across seven stages of AI capability. Under ten minutes. Research-backed scoring.