Earlier this month, autonomous vehicle company Motional laid off 154 of its Pittsburgh area employees. The Pittsburgh Technology Council is pushing to retain the talent in the region to help keep Pittsburgh's status as a hub for the autonomous vehicle industry.
"Talent is the number one asset that causes the region's economy to grow and the fact that we have a super cluster of autonomous vehicle related talent, probably one of the strongest super clusters in the country, is definitely the secret ingredient to attracting billions of dollars of venture capital that's been invested," Brian Kennedy, PTC senior vice president for operations and governmental affairs, said. "When you see one company downsizing you have dozens more that are like 'how do we keep some of that talent here in Pittsburgh."
Kennedy said that "our success in retaining this talent will determine the future of this industry in Pittsburgh."
As part of these efforts, the PTC has organized a virtual "Dream Teams" job fair event, held May 30, connecting laid off employees with prospective employers. This is the eighth of these events that the council has organized, Kennedy said.
"A year and a half ago we sat down as a team and said, 'look, we're about to enter a period of time where capital markets are going to be really tight," Kennedy said. "We're going to see some incredible talent being displaced as a result of these kinds of economic trends, so what can we do to get ahead of this before it happens."
The first of these events occurred when Argo AI, another autonomous vehicle company, shuttered its doors in 2022.
"What always really impresses me about these events is how the region responds," Marie Pelloni, PTC director of talent attraction, said. "Watching [talent] be able to shift and be successful and contribute and take the failures they learned from and build on them is just amazing to see."
Within the broader autonomy sector in the region there are a variety of goals. Motional is primarily focused on robotaxis, a technology that Strip District-based Aurora Innovation Inc. has worked on in the past with Toyota. But Aurora's immediate focus is on developing autonomous trucks, something that Argo AI's successor, StackAV, is also focused on. Other companies, like Warrendale-based Neya Systems, are developing off road autonomous solutions.
"As a region itself, we have always shown, even historically, that we really are able to pivot, so I think that even within even the autonomous vehicle industry, that is what they're able to do and they're able to continuously build on what's working in the autonomous vehicle sector," Pelloni said. "I think it's very much a team effort. As much as they are in competition with each other, they're constantly learning and growing alongside (each other)."
In addition to capital issues, Kennedy attributed issues in the sector to broader trends in the automotive industry.
"As autonomous technology approaches and gets closer to deployment and what it is going to look like when it gets to market, you have a better idea of what the regulatory hurdles are going to be and what the applications are going to be," Kennedy said. "Automotive companies have been funding this development and the automotive companies are facing their own market struggles right now in terms of selling cars. A lot of them have taken a second look at what autonomy means to them and for some of them it doesn't mean having an autonomous robo-fleet."
Instead of fleet development, Kennedy said he believes vehicle manufacturers are more interested in lower level autonomous technology, similar to the ones found in Tesla vehicles.
"Tesla's already made billions of dollars off of it," Kennedy said. "These systems can generate revenue immediately but the promise of [higher-capability autonomy] generating revenue is a slower ramp because the march of nines is so much longer."
