Aerospace & Defense: AI adoption is outrunning organizational absorptive capacity

PwC's "Aerospace and defense agenda 2026" survey surfaces a figure that stands out from the rest of the industrial economy: 57% of A&D executives say they already use AI to transform design and engineering workflows, 16 points above the cross-industry average. Nearly one in two (49%) expect most production to be AI-enabled by 2030.

The same survey reveals a less-discussed signal: 42% of those same executives expect their technology capabilities to outpace their existing infrastructure by 2030 — versus 26% cross-industry. In other words, the sector adopting AI fastest is also the one anticipating the widest gap between what the technology could do and what the organization can actually absorb.

The mismatch shows up downstream too: only 26% of executives are currently investing in redundant system failover to build self-healing supply chains, while 45% plan to reshore or nearshore most production by 2030 — a shift that itself requires digital infrastructure able to absorb the added complexity.

For Cardan-AI, the metric worth watching is not the AI adoption rate, already high and rising, but the widening gap between technological intent and organizational capacity to exploit it — a gap that, left unaddressed, turns into pilot projects that never scale.