USG is advancing this work through next-generation product designs, alternative raw materials, and modernized testing methodologies that reflect how buildings are constructed today, rather than how standards were defined decades ago.
Addressing Skilled Labor Shortages & Improve Job-Site Productivity while Supporting Sustainability in Building Materials
Q&A with Dr. Srinivas Veeramasuneni, Chief Technology Officer | USG Corporation
As CTO of a company that essentially defined the modern building materials industry over a century ago, how do you balance preserving USG’s historic legacy with the need to disrupt your own products?
It is a privilege to work for a company that has led innovation in the building industry for more than 100 years. USG’s legacy is rooted in delivering solutions that advance safety, performance, and construction speed. We sustain that leadership through a disciplined portfolio of both incremental and breakthrough innovations. This balanced approach allows us to honor our heritage while continuing to transform how buildings are constructed in North America. By advancing lightweight solutions and accelerating the shift from wet to dry construction methods, we are improving jobsite efficiency and productivity. We continually refresh our core platforms to address current customer needs while developing sustainable solutions for the future – guided by deeply customer-centric mindset and a collaborative culture that drives purposeful innovation. This is how USG has delivered value for the past century and how we will continue to do so for the next.
Many companies innovate to catch up, but USG has spent 100+ years setting the standard. How does your team at the Corporate Innovation Center (CIC) stay ahead of commodity thinking to ensure a wallboard isn't just a wallboard?"
At USG, we advance our tradition of customer-centric innovation by delivering system solutions that address both current challenges and emerging needs. Our teams focus on system-level performance rather than individual products, recognizing that a wallboard is never simply a wallboard—it is an integral component of fire protection, acoustics, structural integrity, and sustainability. By deeply understanding customer challenges, we develop solutions that deliver meaningful value and impact.
We integrate materials science, building science, manufacturing expertise, and customer insights to create simple, effective system solutions. Innovations such as the Sheetrock® Ultralight Tough panel are designed to address skilled labor shortages, improve job-site productivity, enhance safety, and support sustainability. We remain committed to delivering value-based solutions with the customer at the center.
Sheetrock® changed the world in 1917 by making buildings safer and faster to build. In the era of Ultralight Tough,' what are the new 'unsolved' problems in building science that you are tackling today?
Sheetrock® is widely recognized as one of the most influential building innovations of the 20th century, replacing labor-intensive wet plaster with a faster, safer, and more efficient dry construction process. Today, the industry faces a new set of unresolved challenges driven by labor shortages, sustainability imperatives, resilience requirements, and continuously evolving building codes. These challenges demand solutions that enable faster and safer installation, preserve passive fire protection in taller and more complex structures, significantly reduce embodied carbon without compromising performance, and maintain durability under increasingly extreme climate conditions.
Ultralight Tough™ represents a significant step forward, delivering substantial weight reduction while maintaining the strength and durability customers expect. However, it is not an endpoint—it is a foundation. USG is advancing this work through next-generation product designs, alternative raw materials, and modernized testing methodologies that reflect how buildings are constructed today, rather than how standards were defined decades ago.
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Tell me more about USG’s Corporate Innovation Centre in the Chicago area. What kind of work takes place there and how is it different from what your competitors are doing?
USG’s Corporate Innovation Center (CIC), located near Chicago, is a 200,000-square-foot, end-to-end innovation hub that advances ideas from laboratory research through pilot-scale manufacturing. It supports the full product innovation lifecycle by integrating scientific discovery, performance validation, and manufacturing relevance within a single facility.
The CIC’s people-centric, integrated model brings together multidisciplinary teams spanning materials science, engineering, manufacturing scale-up, and performance testing. These teams collaborate closely with USG plants, customers, suppliers, and academic partners to ensure innovations are developed with real-world manufacturing conditions, performance requirements, and customer needs in mind from the outset.
The CIC team is tightly connected to USG’s manufacturing network, enabling solutions to be designed for scale, reliability, and consistency from day one. Digital and AI-enabled tools further accelerate innovation by enhancing knowledge discovery, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and access to prior data—allowing USG to translate science into high-confidence, manufacturable products customers can trust.
USG has committed to Science-Based Targets (SBTi). From a technical standpoint, what is harder to innovate: a more sustainable raw material (like synthetic gypsum) or a more energy-efficient manufacturing process?
We view this as two sides of the same coin. Achieving our Science-Based Targets requires progress in both sustainable raw materials and energy-efficient manufacturing, and neither can be addressed in isolation. USG is building on nearly 125 years of science-based innovation, combined with deep manufacturing and engineering expertise. That foundation allows us to evaluate new materials through a rigorous lens of performance, reliability, and scalability, ensuring they meet the expectations our customers have today.
Improving the energy efficiency of our manufacturing processes is equally complex. Many of our operations are inherently energy-intensive, so meaningful reductions require thoughtful engineering, process innovation, and modernization—often within plants that have been operating successfully for decades. These changes must be implemented in ways that protect safety, quality, and supply reliability. What makes this work possible is collaboration across research, manufacturing, engineering, and our customers. Sustainability solutions only create impact when they are practical, manufacturable, and aligned with real-world performance requirements. By advancing materials and processes together, we are meeting the needs of our customers today while acting responsibly with future generations in mind.
The construction industry is facing a massive skilled labor shortage. How does USG’s technology strategy help the company’s workforce achieve high-quality results?
The skilled labor shortage is one of the defining challenges facing construction and manufacturing today, and at USG we’ve designed our technology strategy specifically to address that reality not by replacing people, but with a people-first perspective focused on amplifying our employee capabilities. Our focus is on what we call the Digital Smart Factory, which is built around four principles: hands off, eyes focused, minds empowered, centered around an engaged workforce. In practical terms, that means we use automation and advanced technologies to remove non-value-added work, simplify complex decisions, and embed expert knowledge directly into our operations.
As experience levels decline across the industry, technology helps us standardize quality, guide less-experienced operators, and enables consistent, real-time decision-making. Digital work instructions, automated controls, and AI-driven insights allow a less experienced workforce to achieve the same or better-quality outcomes that once required decades of experience. Just as important, this strategy makes work safer, more meaningful, and more engaging. Instead of reacting to problems, our teams are increasingly focused on proactive improvement and higher-value problem solving.
Ultimately, our technology strategy isn’t about tools. It’s about building a resilient workforce model that allows USG to deliver consistent, high-quality products today while preparing our people and our plants for the future.
If we look 10 or 20 years out, will we still be using gypsum-based wallboard? Is there a 'holy grail' material or technology that USG’s Corporate Innovation Center is currently chasing?
Gypsum has remained a cornerstone of construction for centuries due to its inherent fire resistance, global availability, recyclability, and compelling cost-to-performance profile. As one of the world’s most abundant minerals, gypsum-based systems will continue to underpin the built environment for decades.
USG does not frame the future as a choice between gypsum and alternative materials. Rather, the opportunity lies in advancing gypsum-based systems to address evolving performance requirements, sustainability goals, and customer expectations. Through the Corporate Innovation Center (CIC), USG is driving the development of lighter, stronger, lower-carbon, and more resilient solutions that deliver meaningful step-change improvements.
This progress will be achieved through a platform-driven approach integrating advanced design, novel binders, enhanced reinforcement, and modern testing methodologies rather than reliance on a single breakthrough material. While remaining anchored in core capabilities, the CIC actively partners with universities, startups, suppliers, and research institutions to translate emerging technologies into solutions that are scalable, manufacturable, and commercially viable.
Many legacy manufacturers struggle with digital debt. How is USG integrating Industry 4.0 technologies, like IoT sensors, predictive maintenance or AI-driven quality control, into plants that have been operating for decades?
Our plants have operated successfully for decades because they were built on strong engineering fundamentals and a deep understanding of customer needs. Our Industry 4.0 strategy builds on that foundation, using digital capabilities to enhance not replace proven operations.
To be the easiest company to do business with, we must deliver consistent quality, reliable supply, and predictable performance. Sensors, advanced analytics, and AI support these outcomes by improving equipment reliability, stabilizing processes, and identifying issues earlier. We deploy these technologies in a disciplined, incremental manner, layering them onto existing systems where they create clear value while maintaining safety, continuity, and product consistency.
Equally important is our focus on people and operating discipline. Digital tools create value only when embedded into standard work and continuous improvement. By integrating technology with workforce enablement and disciplined execution, we ensure these capabilities scale effectively and deliver sustained results in support of our long-term commitment to our customers.
In a competitive global market, speed-to-market is critical. How has USG’s approach to R&D evolved to allow your team to iterate on new formulations and testing protocols more rapidly than the traditional industry cycle?
Speed to market today isn’t about moving faster, it’s about learning faster. USG’s R&D approach has evolved from a traditional, linear stage-gate model to a more agile, hypothesis-driven framework that enables rapid iteration while reducing risk. This means focusing early on the customer problems, not just technically interesting ones. Teams rapidly formulate and screen new concepts using predictive science, followed by early, realistic testing in full-scale fire, structural, and acoustics labs. Recently we added AI driven discovery engine to search both internal and external research papers. Just as importantly, promising early-stage concepts are tested with customers to gather real-world feedback and refine ideas before significant resources are committed. This approach allows USG to Iterate quickly on formulations and testing protocols, validate performance under realistic conditions early in development, incorporate customer input to refine concepts and ensure market relevance, and establish tight feedback loops with manufacturing and commercial teams.
Because USG’s R&D teams operate at the intersection of science, manufacturing, and customer needs, they can quickly determine what is viable—and what is not—before moving to scale. The result is shorter development cycles, fewer late-stage surprises, and greater confidence at launch, which is especially critical in a safety-driven industry like building materials.
As CTO, where do you look for inspiration outside of the construction world? Are there technologies in aerospace, automotive or consumer electronics that you believe will eventually find a home in the way we manufacture buildings?
My inspiration comes from nature, our people, both colleagues and customers, and technology advances emerging across other industries. While construction has traditionally taken a cautious approach to change, it is increasingly embracing proven technologies from adjacent fields. We have seen tangible benefits from aerospace-inspired lightweighting, automotive driven acoustics, and sensor technologies developed for consumer electronics. As collaboration and information flow accelerates across industries, this pattern of adoption will continue. Looking ahead, robotics, additive manufacturing, automation, and AI will play an important role in steadily improving how we design, manufacture, and build driving greater efficiency, quality, and sustainability over time.
Dr. Srinivas Veeramasuneni is USG’s Chief Technology Officer, responsible for shaping the company’s innovation strategy, engineering, supply chain and commercialization efforts. He earned a Ph.D. in Metallurgical Engineering and joined USG in 1998. Srinivas has an impressive portfolio that includes 15 U.S. patents and nearly 25 papers in surface-science journals. His awards include the AIME Rossiter W. Raymond Memorial Award and recognition as a 2017 Chicago Business Leader of Color. He serves on the boards of the Innovation Research Interchange and Indo American Community Services and has held leadership roles in ASTM and SME committees.
The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of ManufacturingTomorrow
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