TX universities are offering AI degrees. Is it the answer for a changing workforce?

The degrees are meant to help students succeed in a range of workplaces. “Think about it this way,” one academic said. “Finance is a domain. Marketing is a domain. But AI is not really a domain."

“Who wants to go first?”

During the last week of the spring semester, a few dozen graduate students, in a mix of sweatshirts and business attire, chatted softly around tables as they awaited the start of their Agentic AI class, a new course in the University of Texas at Dallas’ M.S. in Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence program. They were led by an affable Brazilian professor named Antonio Paes, who briefly scanned the classroom and selected one group to present their final project.

“Yes, you go. I saw you debating about it,” Paes announced, provoking laughs.

As the North Texas AI boom surges, how is AI impacting your daily work life, and how has it changed your career choices?

The three soft-spoken young men took the front of the classroom and — after some brief technical difficulties — began running the sophisticated AI modeling system they had created over the past week. As AI-generated code scrolled on a large projector, they explained that their program, called Chain Pilot, was designed to help businesses adjust to real-world supply chain shocks by continuously monitoring inventory and pricing. It was designed to sometimes automatically implement solutions, saving human managers critical time; in a more unique twist, it also incorporates multiple AI agents, including a “skeptic” agent and an “advocate” agent, that are intentionally pitted against each other to help humans select the optimum solution to bigger problems. Later, another small group presented their customizable AI-powered travel planner. Another, the final group, explained how its AI model crawled the internet to identify competitors’ pricing history and offer detailed recommendations.

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