The world is betting on AI. It still needs a plumber.

Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.

As AI-driven layoffs reshape white-collar work, plumbing is emerging as one of the clearest counterexamples: physical, judgment-based work with no obvious automation path, at the same time demand for skilled technicians is climbing.

Key takeaways

• The U.S. is forecast to face a shortage of roughly 550,000 plumbers, according to John Dunham and Associates. That gap is structural, driven by a retiring workforce and rising infrastructure demand, not a cyclical dip.

• AI has no near-term path to replacing hands-on diagnostic and repair work done in crawlspaces, walls, and underground lines. AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton has publicly named plumbing as one of the safer career bets in an AI economy.

• BlackRock committed $100 million over five years through its Future Builders initiative to train 50,000 electrical, HVAC, and plumbing workers, a sign capital is following the shortage.

• AI is changing back-office tasks at plumbing companies, such as dispatching, scheduling, and quoting, not the technician’s job itself.

Darren Large, a Roto-Rooter service technician of almost four years, starts most days with a simple check-in: he reaches out to his dispatcher to find out where the first call will take him. After that, the day can go in almost any direction.

“We offer multiple plumbing and drain services, and every job is different and has its own challenges,” Large says. “This means that I never know what I might get into on any given day.”

That unpredictability is part of what keeps him in the trade. It is also what makes plumbing such a hard job to automate. A service call is not a clean software problem with a predictable input and output. It is a real building, a real customer, and often a hidden problem behind a wall, under a floor, or inside a drain line.

Plumbing is one of the few professions being described, with a straight face, as AI-proof. While AI-driven layoffs dominate headlines in tech, finance, and other white-collar fields, demand for plumbing keeps climbing, and the reasons are structural rather than sentimental.

The shortage, by the numbers

The U.S. is forecast to face a shortage of roughly 550,000 plumbers, according to a figure from John Dunham and Associates that gets cited across recent labor-market reporting on the trades. Two forces are driving the gap. A large share of the current plumbing workforce is aging toward retirement faster than new workers are entering the trade. At the same time, infrastructure investment and new construction are adding demand for the same limited pool of licensed technicians. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates employment growth for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters to be about 7% between 2023 and 2033, translating to roughly 43,300 openings a year from growth and retirements combined. The average growth rate for all occupations is 3 percent, so this is more than double the normal growth rate for occupations. 

Why this work resists automation

Plumbing repair resists automation because it happens in crawlspaces, wall cavities, underground trenches, and mechanical rooms that are different in every building, which means the job is built around real-time judgment calls, not a repeatable procedure. A technician has to physically get into the space, assess a specific pipe or fitting that does not match a diagram, and decide on the spot whether to repair, reroute, or replace it.

“You cannot train a robot to replace a faucet,” Large says.

That combination of physical presence in unpredictable spaces, manual dexterity, and situational judgment is exactly where current AI and robotics face substantial limitations. Geoffrey Hinton, the AI researcher often called the “Godfather of AI,” made this point directly in a June 2025 interview on The Diary of a CEO, saying it will be “a long time” before AI is good at physical manipulation and that “a good bet would be to be a plumber.”

Large sees the same point from the field. He does not spend much time worrying about AI replacing his work because the work depends on being there in person, adapting to what a customer needs, and solving whatever the building reveals once the job begins.

The irony: AI’s own infrastructure boom is competing for the same workers

The AI industry depends on data center construction, and that construction itself requires enormous numbers of electricians and plumbers to build and maintain. It is pulling skilled trades workers away from residential and commercial plumbing work, tightening the same labor pool homeowners and businesses depend on. The technology that is supposed to be displacing workers is, in this specific case, competing for them.

Capital is following the shortage

BlackRock committed $100 million over five years through its Future Builders initiative to train 50,000 workers in electrical, HVAC, and plumbing roles. That is a scale of commitment usually reserved for industries with long-term, durable demand, and a sign investment is starting to treat the trades shortage as a structural bet, not a temporary blip.

Where AI actually shows up in plumbing companies

None of this means AI is irrelevant to the plumbing industry. It just is not showing up where the “robots will fix your pipes” version of the story assumes. AI tools are increasingly used on the business side of plumbing companies: dispatching technicians more efficiently, handling scheduling, generating invoices and quotes, and managing customer communication.

That is a real shift in how plumbing companies operate day to day. It is not a shift in who does the physical work, and it is worth being precise about that distinction rather than overstating AI’s role in either direction.

A day in the life of a Roto-Rooter technician

Large did not enter the plumbing profession in a straight line. Before joining Roto-Rooter, he worked in retail and banking. In high school, he also worked for a general contractor on renovation and remodeling jobs, which gave him early exposure to hands-on building work.

He considered college and tried other career paths, but none felt like the right fit. Plumbing won, he says, because it offered a practical way in and a strong financial case from the start.

“Plumbing is a great field to be a part of,” Large says. “There are no higher education requirements to get started and financially it is lucrative from day one.”

The appeal is not only the paycheck. For Large, the job offers something a desk job could not: variety, movement, and the chance to learn under pressure.

“I like the unpredictability of this position the best,” he says. “Every day brings its own challenges and opportunities to learn something new on the job.”

There is also the customer side of the work. People do not usually call a plumber because everything is fine. They call because a problem has already disrupted the day, the home, or the business, and they need someone who can step in with the right tools and judgment.

“I love having the opportunity to help our customers out of a tough situation,” Large says. 

“These customers are calling us because they have an issue that they cannot fix on their own, and they have nowhere to turn other than to hire a professional. It feels good to be the person who is able to come in and save the day.”

The career pitch in 2026

For workers weighing college, office jobs, and trade work in 2026, plumbing has a clearer pitch than it did even a few years ago. It offers paid entry into a field with durable demand, a path to licensure and business ownership, and work that is insulated from the parts of the economy most exposed to automation.

“Trades generally are always a safe bet when looking for a career path,” Large says. “These jobs are always going to be there, and there will always be a demand for this kind of work.”

His advice to young people is direct: college can mean years of borrowing before a first full-time paycheck, while a trade can mean earning immediately while building lifelong skills that also matter outside work.

“Starting in a trade will get you paid from day one and will teach lifelong skills that will help not only in your career but also as a homeowner,” Large says.

The reframe

A profession that requires physical presence, dexterity, and real-time judgment is structurally positioned to keep growing, even as AI reshapes office and administrative work around it. The shortage is real, the investment following it is real, and the work itself has not gotten any easier to automate.

With one of North America’s largest plumbing and drain services networks, Roto-Rooter sees that shortage and demand from the inside, market by market, every day. Large puts the worker-side case plainly: trades are difficult for AI to touch, the demand is not going away, and the person who can show up and solve the problem still matters.