(TNS) — “Who wants to go first?”
During the last week of the spring semester, dozens of graduate students in sweatshirts and business attire chat quietly around tables as they await the start of the Agenttic AI class, a new course in the University of Texas at Dallas’ master’s degree program in business analytics and artificial intelligence. Led by an amiable Brazilian professor named Antonio Paes, they scanned the classroom and selected one group to present their final project.
“Yes, go ahead. I saw you discussing it,” Paes said, drawing laughter.
Three soft-spoken young men took up positions at the front of the classroom and, after some technical hiccups, began running the sophisticated AI modeling system they had spent the past week creating. As AI-generated code scrolled on a large projector, they explained that their program, called Chain Pilot, is designed to help companies adapt to real-world supply chain shocks by continuously monitoring inventory and prices. It is designed to automatically implement solutions in some cases, saving human administrators critical time. An even more unique twist is the inclusion of multiple AI agents, including a “skeptic” agent and a “defender” agent, which are intentionally pitted against each other to help humans choose the best solution to a larger problem. Later, another small group introduced a customizable AI-powered travel planner. Another final group explained how their AI models scour the internet to identify competitors’ pricing history and provide detailed recommendations.
“It was really good. I think all the applications are really useful,” Paes told the class. “For this last project, we can take this to small and medium-sized businesses and sell it because it’s fully usable right now,” he added.
But with many companies delaying new hires due in part to the uncertainty surrounding AI, the burgeoning AI gurus are likely to enter a job market that remains tough, especially for new graduates. Texas universities, including major institutions in D-FW, are trying to stay ahead by offering bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in AI that would have been a headache just a few years ago. Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programs in AI are often combined with more traditional fields, such as business or engineering, and are designed to provide graduates with not just basic AI fluency, but a level of expertise aimed at being useful in a wide range of workplaces.
“Think of it this way,” says Gaurav Shekhar, associate dean and associate professor at UT Dallas’ Naveen Jindal School of Management, who helped implement UTD’s AI program. “Finance is a domain. Marketing is a domain. But AI isn’t really a domain.”
“AI is here to stay.”
The country’s first AI degree was launched at Carnegie Mellon University in 2018, about four years before the public release of ChatGPT sparked a global AI frenzy. Decades earlier, Carnegie Mellon University was also a research university in Pittsburgh, playing an important role in the development of technology.
“We want to be the first company to offer a bachelor’s degree program in AI,” Reid Simmons, director of the new program, said in a statement at the time. “I’m confident we’re not the last. AI is here to stay.”
Simmons was right. As of last year, more than 300 universities across the U.S. offered bachelor’s or master’s degree AI programs, according to a tally by one higher education company. More to come. In the past few months, the University of Tulsa, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Michigan Technological University have all announced new bachelor’s degrees in AI or Applied AI. Syracuse University announced a new bachelor’s degree in integrated AI, and the University of Mary Washington debuted what it calls Virginia’s first master’s degree in AI in business.
Texas currently has more than 20 AI master’s and bachelor’s degree programs, the most of any state, including bachelor’s degrees from UTEP and, starting this fall, the University of North Texas College of Engineering, according to a count by Degree Prospects. The program was announced as Denton College decided to cut 12 degree programs in fields such as linguistics and gender studies, citing a $45 million budget deficit.
UNT economics professor and then-provost Michael McPherson, who proposed the program, said at a February board meeting that the new AI program aims to “prepare students to succeed in a tremendously evolving world.” “It makes our heads spin, but I also think it addresses a growing and important need in our society.”
Other Texas universities, including Texas A&M, offer AI minors and certificate programs, but not full degree programs. That could change, said John Jasperson, associate dean of Texas A&M’s Mays School of Business. Last fall, the school enrolled nearly 1,500 students across its AI in Business programs.
“Even if that means ‘taking one of our existing degrees and rethinking it and refocusing it,'” Jasperson said. Or do we say, “Let’s create a completely new program.”
UTD launched its Business Analytics master’s program in 2014 and undergraduate program in 2022 through the Naveen Jindal School of Management. In 2024, we changed the names of both programs to include AI. But tech-heavy universities have already been teaching AI-related courses for years. Shekhar said the rebranding was less about capitalizing on hot academic trends and more about updating the name to reflect the program’s content.
“They started renaming a lot of programs across the country. They just started calling them AI or something,” Shekhar added. “For many people it was a big marketing need, but for us at the University of Texas at Dallas, it was literally just a name change.”
The four-year undergraduate program offers a variety of concentrations, including marketing analytics and AI, finance and risk analysis, and requires core business classes as well as AI-related coursework. The two-year master’s program offers courses in data science and accounting analysis, as well as more specialized courses such as applied machine learning and robotic process automation. This spring, 50 students graduated from the undergraduate program and 289 students graduated from the master’s program.
One of the biggest hits was Paes’ new Agentic AI class, where 50 fully enrolled students used their advanced skills with AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT to develop projects aimed at solving problems ranging from UTD’s parking problem to the scourge of medical billing errors in the American healthcare industry.
“We built an agent that tracks it. It tells us line by line what’s wrong with the bill in layman’s language. It also creates a PDF, which we send to the hospital and they can dispute the bill,” explained Rady Musa, a student in his late 20s. Musa, the financial analyst, added that he would charge a fee of several hundred dollars to initiate the same process. “And our agents do it for free.”
A knock on the door, but not an invitation to a party
AI students in Texas are likely to encounter a highly uncertain and rapidly changing job market, whether they have just completed their master’s degree or are several years away from completing their bachelor’s degree. The main reason for this is that even though the U.S. and Texas economies maintain relatively low unemployment rates, both have long-standing trends of “low hiring, low firing.” This phenomenon is due in part to companies’ decisions to pause hiring amid the AI upheaval.
Meanwhile, some big tech companies, including Meta, are making large-scale layoffs as they spend billions of dollars on AI. Job growth in Texas was largely flat last year and likely to remain at least slightly below the state’s traditional pace this year, but a recent survey found that 10% of companies already say AI is reducing their need for human workers.
The people most affected are young job hunters.
“Even young, well-educated workers are finding it harder to get jobs as companies scale back on job openings and expansions,” St. Louis Fed researchers William Rogers III and Alice Cassens wrote last month.
Graduates with an AI degree want to stand out, establishing themselves as technology enthusiasts as well as savvy implementers. That’s more likely to happen through their ability to demonstrate real-world application of technology than the trendy two letters on a diploma, several career experts and companies told The Dallas Morning News.
“With our technology and operations, [division]That’s where the vast majority of our employees are and can play an important role,” Bank of America Dallas President Jennifer Chandler said of the advanced AI qualifications.
But in a world where almost every college graduate is now AI-savvy, what really matters is the candidate’s proven experience, Chandler added. “Where have you demonstrated that you have leveraged your expertise to save your company time and increase efficiency?”
At Ericsson, a global technology company with North American headquarters in North Texas, less than 1 percent of its U.S. hires in 2024 and beyond will have a bachelor’s degree that explicitly names “artificial intelligence,” according to a company representative. However, candidates with what the company considers “AI-related degrees,” such as computer science, IT, and data science, are making up a growing proportion of U.S. hires, spanning more than 275 roles. More than half of that came through the company’s operations in D-FW.
“I would never go out and say that it’s not important to have AI in the title, because it’s the first thing that knocks on the door,” said Rosario Saud, head of talent development at Ericsson Americas. “Then they won’t invite you to the party.”
Saud further added that past AI projects and efforts are stories that candidates can tell on their resumes and interviews. She pointed to a UTD graduate recently hired by Ericsson in a human resources role. One reason was that he won a Google AI competition for a project related to water consumption.
“When we saw the resume, that actually shocked us,” Saud said. “I thought, ‘This is a perfect example of an individual applying AI to something.'”
“What do you do with it?”
Universities also strive to keep up with the changing needs of corporate workplaces. Shekhar said hundreds of companies from industries ranging from health care to financial services visit UTD’s Jindal School of Management every semester, and many are deeply involved in various student projects. AI is always a hot topic.
“Every industry is being disrupted by AI,” he said. “In both good and not so good ways… [companies] All you have to do is engage in academia, because believe it or not, students are the most genius thinkers. ”
Those thinkers are also highly motivated. After Paes’ Agentic AI class ended, the professor gave a short speech. The corporate world may be experiencing a “huge reset” and competition is fierce, he told students. But technological disruption has also created opportunities, allowing students to apply their AI skills to immediately benefit startups and other companies.
“So coding is no longer a problem. Building something is no longer a problem, at least for you,” Paes continued. “The question is, ‘What do we do with it? What kind of innovation is it?'” [do] Are you going to bring it? ”
The group happily gathered for a class photo, and several students were eager to talk to news reporters. One of the graduates, Daniel Beagle, is a former English major and military mechanic who was enrolled in a master’s program to advance into a checking account role. Through Paes’ classes, she created an AI agent that dramatically streamlined the invoice processing she was already doing. “I was able to take my old job and basically take three weeks and cut it down to 38 seconds,” she said.
Another student, an Australian named Muhammad Farid, enrolled because he felt his stable career as a business analyst in the United States was becoming less stable because of AI. He expected to make an immediate impact with a summer internship at Slick City, an indoor amusement park company based in North Texas. “I can bring in the inventory management and inventory accounting know-how I gained from my previous job,” he said. “And we can also bring in agent AI.”
Some wanted to forge a completely new path.
“I would like to completely take a break from finding a job and work 9 to 5,” said Nhan Le, a former office worker in her 20s from Vietnam. Instead, Lee said he hopes to use his background in AI and finance to find a fintech job at a start-up company, or perhaps start his own fintech job.
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