Blackstone COO Jon Gray predicts ‘huge boom’ in blue-collar jobs—his own data center company is hiring 30,000 new roles

Jon Gray, Blackstone (Credit: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

As generative AI threatens to upend the white-collar workforce, it’s creating a surge of opportunity in one corner of the labor market: the skilled trades.

That’s at least according to Jon Gray, president and chief operating officer at Blackstone—the biggest publicly-traded alternative asset manager—who predicted a “huge boom in blue-collar employment certainly over the next five years.”