As the public and private sectors increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) in day-to-day operations, state lawmakers are examining ways to prepare Texas students for a changing workforce and to master this rapidly evolving technology.
During a hearing on Tuesday, Texas Senate Economic Development Committee Chair Angela Paxton (R-McKinney) said lawmakers were developing recommendations to keep the Texas labor market “a national leader in growth and opportunity” in the context of AI use.
Joe Esparza, a commissioner at the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC), said the state created 159,000 jobs over the past year and ranks second in the nation for AI-related job postings.
“What we’ve seen is about 116,000 unique opportunities seeking specialized AI expertise, and this is expected to grow. These job ads are expected to grow by 20 percent over the next two years,” he said.
While AI-related jobs are in high demand in professional, scientific, and technical service industries, as well as in manufacturing, Esparza noted that demand for skilled trades has also grown, with more than 2.6 million job postings across the state — nearly a 14 percent increase over the previous year.
TWC offers several programs to help prepare workers to use AI, including the Skills Development Fund and the Upskills Texas program,which offer grants for training workers in AI-related skills.
The new Advanced Skills Compatibilities and Expertise for New Development fund also provides grants to prepare recipients for work in nuclear energy, advanced aerospace, healthcare, and AI, and other grants are available for schools to purchase equipment for training.
Other witnesses, however, cautioned about AI-related concerns.
“These tools can increase productivity and create new economic value, but our long-term advantage will depend not simply on how quickly Texans adopt AI, but on whether we build a workforce that can use it without weakening knowledge, critical thinking, and human judgment,” according to Miha Vindis, director of the Texas Certified Public Manager Program and a professor at Texas State University and the University of Texas at Austin.
Vindis said that students need to be taught not only what AI is and is not, but where the technology works well and where it fails, and when human oversight matters. He noted that while workers and students can “cognitively offload work” with calculators and navigation systems, those tools do not decide what problem to solve in the first place. AI, he said, creates a new risk when “cognitive offloading can become cognitive surrender.”
“What happens when people increasingly offload their reasoning, through which expertise and judgment are developed?” he asked. “Emerging research suggests that heavy reliance on AI can weaken conceptual understanding and critical thinking skills.”
Vindis recommended that education should not emphasize teaching AI skills over teaching a profession, but instead teach foundational skills that equip students to challenge and verify AI output. He also said students should be able to demonstrate critical competence independent of AI.
Renzo Soto, Deputy Director of Education and Workforce Policy at Texas 2036, acknowledged public anxiety and uncertainty about how AI will affect careers, but argued that Texas can prepare students for the changing employment landscape. To do so, however, he advocated for more data sharing on student progress after graduating from a college or training program.
“We don’t know if the college graduates from this year, from May 2026, have jobs, much less what they’re doing, despite the fact that our coordinating board knows who graduated and the TWC knows everyone that’s in the labor force. We usually don’t know those answers at least until a year afterwards, despite the data existing right now,” Soto said.
Soto added that while lawmakers had approved “very forward-looking” legislation last year such as Senate Bill 1964 and House Bill 3512, he warned that the state needs to provide more practical, specific guidance for educators on teaching safe and appropriate use of AI.
While state lawmakers will likely consider more guidance on student preparation for AI use at K–12 schools, colleges, and career training programs, some schools are forging ahead with AI-related curriculum for younger students, such as that implemented by the Houston Independent School District.
On the same day as the Texas hearing, President Donald Trump referenced AI development during his speech to the United Nations (UN) and added that the technology should be renamed “super intelligence.”
Recently, a former developer at leading AI company Anthropic warned that the technology could destroy humanity and called for increased regulation of the technology, but Trump has dismissed such concerns as a “hoax.”
On Tuesday, he rebuffed a suggested role for the UN in AI development oversight.
“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter called super intelligence. Changing the name,” he said.