As artificial intelligence becomes more common in government, business and the workplace, Texas lawmakers are examining how schools and workforce programs can prepare Texans for jobs that increasingly require familiarity with the technology.

The Texas Senate Committee on Economic Development took up the issue Tuesday as part of its interim work ahead of the next legislative session. The committee is chaired by Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney.

Paxton said lawmakers are developing recommendations aimed at keeping the Texas labor market “a national leader in growth and opportunity” as AI changes the workplace.

Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Joe Esparza told lawmakers that Texas created roughly 159,000 jobs during the past year and ranks second nationally in AI-related job postings. He said employers are already looking for workers with specialized AI skills.

“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,” Esparza said.

AI-related positions are particularly in demand in professional, scientific and technical services and manufacturing. At the same time, demand for skilled trades remains strong, with more than 2.6 million job postings across Texas, an increase of nearly 14 percent from the previous year.

TWC has several programs aimed at helping workers develop new skills, including the Skills Development Fund and Upskills Texas, which can provide grants for training workers in AI-related fields. Other state programs provide funding for training in areas including nuclear energy, advanced aerospace, healthcare and AI, as well as grants that can help schools purchase training equipment.

But Tuesday's hearing was not solely focused on producing more workers who know how to use AI. Lawmakers also heard concerns about what could happen when students and employees become too dependent on it.

Miha Vindis, director of the Texas Certified Public Manager Program and a professor at Texas State University and the University of Texas at Austin, told the committee that Texas needs to preserve the human skills that AI is supposed to supplement.

“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,” Vindis said.

Vindis argued that students should learn what AI can and cannot do, where the technology tends to perform well and where it can fail. They should also understand when human oversight is necessary.

People have long used technology to reduce their mental workload, whether through calculators or navigation systems. Vindis said AI presents a different challenge because users can potentially hand over not just a calculation or navigation task but part of the reasoning process itself. He described the risk as a point where “cognitive offloading can become cognitive surrender.”

“What happens when people increasingly offload their reasoning, through which expertise and judgment are developed?” Vindis asked. “Emerging research suggests that heavy reliance on AI can weaken conceptual understanding and critical thinking skills.”

Rather than making AI skills the centerpiece of education, Vindis recommended that schools continue emphasizing foundational knowledge in a student's chosen profession. Those fundamentals, he said, give workers the ability to question and verify what an AI system produces instead of simply accepting its output.

Students should also be able to demonstrate competence without relying on AI.

Renzo Soto, deputy director of education and workforce policy at Texas 2036, raised another problem: Texas has considerable education and workforce data, but the information is not necessarily available quickly enough to show policymakers what is happening to recent graduates as AI changes the job market.

“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,” Soto said. “We usually don't know those answers at least until a year afterwards, despite the data existing right now.”

Soto said Texas can better prepare students for an uncertain employment landscape if policymakers have more timely information about what happens after students graduate from college or complete workforce training.

He also pointed to AI legislation approved by lawmakers in 2025, including Senate Bill 1964 and House Bill 3512. SB 1964 established a state AI governance framework and directed the Texas Department of Information Resources to develop a public-sector AI sandbox and rules governing certain government AI systems. HB 3512 requires annual AI awareness training for certain state and local government employees and officials.

Soto described the measures as forward-looking but said educators still need more practical and specific guidance about how students should safely and appropriately use AI.

That question is likely to remain part of the discussion as lawmakers consider how AI should be addressed in K-12 schools, colleges and career-training programs. Some districts, including Houston ISD, are already moving ahead with AI-related instruction for younger students.

The Texas hearing came the same day President Donald Trump addressed AI during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Trump said the federal government would begin referring to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” arguing that the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake. He also rejected international efforts to establish broader oversight of AI.

“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,” Trump said.

Trump also dismissed warnings that AI could eventually pose catastrophic risks, while saying the United States should continue encouraging development of the technology rather than slowing its growth.

The debate in Austin, however, centered less on whether AI development can be stopped and more on how Texas can prepare for a technology that is already changing workplaces.

For lawmakers and educators, that could mean balancing two objectives: giving students and workers enough AI knowledge to compete for emerging jobs while ensuring they still develop the critical-thinking and professional skills necessary to recognize when the technology gets something wrong.