AI for Trades: Construction Leads Australia's Job Growth

AI could add up to $116 billion to Australia's economy over the next decade and create as many as 44,000 full-time jobs. Those are the headline numbers from EY-Parthenon modelling released on 5 August 2026. But the figure that matters if you run a trade is buried in the sector breakdown: the single biggest source of new jobs isn't tech, and it isn't accounting. It's construction.

EY Oceania's chief economist, Cherelle Murphy, was specific about why. AI adoption, she said, lifts demand for "new capital, equipment, systems and infrastructure, including the data centres and supporting infrastructure needed to enable the technology." Someone has to build all of that. The trades that pour the slabs, pull the cable and fit out the plant rooms are the demand-side winners of the AI build-out — not its casualties.

The full forecast: AI could lift real GDP by 2.6 to 3.2 per cent by 2036, add between $95 billion and $116 billion in output, drive $31 billion to $38 billion in fresh investment, and support 36,000 to 44,000 additional full-time jobs. EY frames it against a genuine problem — Australia's labour productivity has grown about 0.3 per cent a year over the past decade, less than a quarter of the pace of the decade before. AI is the bet to close that gap.

The sector split is the part worth reading twice. Construction, wholesale trade and retail are projected to see the strongest employment gains, while agriculture and mining — the most capital-intensive, most automatable sectors — record small declines. This is a demand-side story, not just an efficiency one. AI doesn't only make your existing jobs faster. On EY's numbers, it enlarges the pipeline of work coming your way.

Want to know what this means for your business? We'll map it in one call.

This flips the fear that AI is coming for blue-collar work. We've written before that trades are among the occupations least exposed to AI — a model can draft a quote, but it can't pull cable or sign off a switchboard. EY goes a step further: AI doesn't just spare the trades, it grows demand for them. More investment means more building, and more building means more work on your books.

There's a catch, and it's the one every builder already feels. A bigger pipeline is only worth something if you can service it — and you can't service it by hiring. Australia is 83,000 tradespeople short and can't hire its way out, with trade prices up 5.1 per cent in the first half of the year. So EY's forecast and the shortage collide head-on: more work coming, the same crew to do it. The businesses that capture the extra work won't be the ones with the most staff. They'll be the ones getting the most billable hours out of the staff they have.

That's where AI pays off in a trade — not on the tools, but around them. At a loaded rate of $65 to $95 an hour, every hour a technician loses to quoting, chasing parts, re-sequencing a route or returning after-hours calls is margin walking out the door. Put AI on that admin and you free capacity you'd otherwise have to hire for. If you want a read on where your own business is exposed and where the quick wins are, see how exposed your trade is before you spend a dollar on software.

Don't wait for the boom to arrive and find yourself understaffed at the exact moment demand spikes. Pick the single biggest drain on your team's time — quoting turnaround, scheduling, after-hours enquiries — and put AI to work on that one thing now. Measure the hours you get back over a month. That reclaimed capacity is what lets you say yes to the extra work EY says is coming, instead of turning it away because the crew is already flat out.

And if mapping that out feels like one more job you don't have time for, that's exactly the conversation worth having — someone who has done it before can find the capacity already hiding in your week.

Key takeaways

Common questions

Related notes

Will your trade have the capacity to take the extra work?

The demand EY forecasts only pays off if your crew has the hours to service it. Book a call and we'll find the billable capacity already hiding in your admin.