How can Aerospace & Defense engineering leaders accelerate time-to-market amid disruption?

How can
Aerospace & Defense engineering leaders accelerate
time-to-market
amid disruption?

Scaling AI, digital engineering, and global talent to deliver faster

What’s keeping automotive leaders up at night?Contents

Engineering excellence across the product lifecycle

Success factors:

Conclusion

Thank you for reading

Aerospace & Defense Engineering and R&D Pulse 2026

Aerospace and Defense (A&D) are under pressure on multiple fronts. Demand is rising, as backlogs grow and delivery timelines slip. Input costs are increasing, while ongoing design changes – driven by sustainability goals, supply chain disruption, and evolving requirements and regulations – add complexity and expense in a highly regulated environment. Alongside these immediate challenges, companies must invest heavily in next-generation platforms, delivering step changes in efficiency, emissions, and operating costs.

This pressure coincides with a structural transition for the industry: over the next decade, A&D organizations must replace platforms largely designed in the 1980s with next-generation systems, while continuing to deliver and support legacy programs at scale. With thousands of experienced engineers and architects approaching retirement, the risk is not just slower delivery, but loss of critical know-how.

To better understand how leaders are navigating these challenges, Capgemini surveyed 200 senior Aerospace & Defense executives across OEMs, suppliers, airlines, airports, and defense organizations as part of our 2026 cross-sector Engineering and R&D Pulse research. We hope this collective view of the industry will help everyone gauge their position relative to their peers, and better understand shared challenges and solutions.

What we found

A need to move faster

Our ER&D Pulse survey shows that improving time-to-market is the sector’s top priority, beating other priorities including cost reduction, capacity scaling, agility, and regulatory compliance. (Chart 1).

This urgency is rooted in executives’ lived experience. Three quarters say design timelines have increased over the last three years. Even more say production and times have lengthened, and 85% also say costs have risen (Chart 2). All this is happening whilst order books swell and backlogs mount.

Being faster - and thus reducing total costs - is not just good business, it may be existential. Around half worried that failure to improve could see emerging players steal their lunch (Chart 3). In an industry with such high barriers to entry, this is an alarming finding, but it shows that even Aerospace and Defense is not immune to disruption.

This urgency is amplified by the need to run two engineering models in parallel: accelerating delivery of existing programs while redesigning future platforms with fundamentally new technologies. Many organizations are not yet structured to do both at once.

How much do they need to improve on speed and cost? Answers varied, but many respondents suggested they needed to see 5-15% improvements in both to remain competitive in the coming years (Chart 4).

Faster. But also more innovative, more flexible, lower cost, and with reliable access to talent

Whilst time-to-market came out top for many when asked to choose where they would focus (Chart 1), it is far from the only concern. Innovation and value creation using digital technologies was important to 80% (Chart 5). This is an area of investment that plays a significant role in cutting time-to-market, as well as delivering other priorities, such as reducing costs and improving organizational agility – both of which are important to over half of organizations surveyed (Chart 5).

Nurturing the next generation of talent was also a priority. Interestingly, safety and compliance were seen as very important to almost everyone (80%), but most did not list it in their top priorities for action (Chart 1). Our assumption is that this reflects maturity in this area, with rigorous processes already in place. Whilst perhaps not an area of active transformation in its own right, compliance must of course remain at the heart of everything, even as the shape of the organization changes.

A challenging world

Delivering these priorities will not be easy. Aerospace & Defense companies face a tough environment, and leaders reported significant exposure to multiple, overlapping risks. These ranged from supply chain disruptions and geopolitical uncertainty (cited as a major threat by 74% and 73% respectively) – driven by climate events, tariffs, sovereignty mandates, trade barriers, and conflict – to shortages in talent, cited as a major threat by 73% (especially in engineering, digital, and AI).

Looming over all of this is AI, which is seen as a potential disruptive threat by 78% of leaders, but also a huge opportunity, as we will come onto separately.

Is Aerospace & Defense ready for a changing world?

Despite these concerns, organizational preparedness was felt to be relatively low. Just 37% said their company was well prepared for the talent shortage, and 38% for supply chain disruptions. A slightly higher 48% said they were ready for geopolitical uncertainty, and 46% felt prepared for AI. Lack of preparedness for challenges has real consequences – capacity bottlenecks in engineering roles or supply chains translate into slower concept development, manufacture, and certification – at a time when they say they need to speed up.

All of this implies that traditional development and production cycles are not meeting the challenges of market demand, volatility, and the competitive environment in which Aerospace & Defense players operate.

How is the industry responding?

The above responses suggest Aerospace & Defense needs to move faster across the lifecycle, whilst cutting costs. This includes faster innovation, production, and certification on one hand, whilst removing the bottlenecks caused by skills shortages and supply chain disruptions on the other.

To respond, leaders have strategic levers they can pull.

Two in particular emerge from our research. Firstly, the use of AI and digital technology to bring efficiencies across the engineering lifecycle that speed time to market, as well as delivering cost savings and agility improvements. Secondly, the role of global talent models to access the required skills, and to take advantage of more innovative facilities and collaborative cultures. This allows companies to innovate, produce, and certify with speed, whilst meeting regulations and keeping costs under control.

In this paper, we explore how Aerospace & Defense are facing these challenges and deploying these solutions across four stages of the engineering lifecycle.