36% of industrial tasks seen as “agentic-AI-augmentable” — adoption is still in pilot mode
Deloitte estimates that 36% of tasks in industrial products manufacturing could be augmented by agentic AI. The same report finds that most aerospace and defense manufacturers remain stuck at the pilot stage — defect detection, maintenance diagnostics.
In its “From Vision to Value” report (September 2025), cited in its 2026 aerospace and defense industry outlook, Deloitte puts a hard number on the opportunity: 36% of tasks performed across industrial products manufacturing could benefit from augmentation by agentic AI — software agents able to chain autonomous actions, beyond simple text or image generation.
The same document immediately tempers that technical potential with an adoption reality check: most aerospace and defense organizations, per Deloitte, remain in early-stage AI deployment, held back by operational risk and the sector's regulatory requirements. The concrete use cases cited stay narrow pilot programs — AI-assisted visual defect detection, predictive maintenance diagnostics — rather than production-line-wide rollout.
The same report also quantifies the expected skills shift: the share of aerospace job postings mentioning data-analysis skills is projected to rise from 9% (2025) to nearly 14% (2028), and data-science skills from 3% to 5% over the same period (Deloitte analysis of Lightcast job-posting data, October 2025–December 2028 forecast).
The gap between a technical potential covering over a third of tasks and a deployment reality still confined to pilots isn't unique to aerospace — it's a pattern Cardan-AI has tracked across regulated industrial sectors (energy, oil & gas, defense). See our full analysis.
Analysis by
Cardan-AI Intelligence
Our research and analysis unit, dedicated to applied AI for business, industry and regulatory compliance.
Let's talk about your next competitive edge
A 30-minute conversation to identify your most profitable AI use cases.