Prominent companies in North Texas are using artificial intelligence to help create customized reports, test website flows, re-stock store shelves, and hyper-personalize consumer products. The revolutionary, fast-moving technology is aimed at augmenting rather than replacing their employees, the companies say—even as AI’s “unknowns” have triggered some anxiety about the very future of work.  

Those are just a few of many takeaways from the Convergence AI Dallas conference hosted April 30-May 1 by the Dallas Regional Chamber. Held for the second year at the Irving Convention Center, the event featured 75 expert speakers and attracted more than 750 innovators, leaders, builders, and advocates from the Dallas-Fort Worth AI ecosystem.

Jorge Corral, senior managing director at Accenture—the event’s co-presenting sponsor with Google—told attendees that Dallas “has quietly become a North American powerhouse for AI, thanks to our robust talent pipeline, strong business environment, and top-notch research.” He pointed to the region’s five R1 universities and 22 Fortune 500 headquarters, as well as its diversity of industries and the country’s fourth-largest high-tech workforce.

Jorge Corral, senior managing director at Accenture, sets the tone for Convergence AI with a kickoff focused on the State of AI in Dallas-Fort Worth. [Photo: Michael Samples/Dallas Innovates]

The president and CEO of the Dallas Regional Chamber, Dale Petroskey, noted that the conference—the brainchild of Duane Dankesreiter, the chamber’s SVP for research and innovation—had expanded to two days this year after 2024’s inaugural, single-day meeting.

Keeping the “region and its companies on the leading edge of what’s going on in the tech world” is important to the chamber, whose priorities are economic development, education, public policy, and quality of life, Petroskey said. “AI is impacting every one of these areas,” he added. “That’s why we bring this conference together, because it impacts everything all of us do every single day—and will increasingly in our lives.” 

The importance of a collaborative approach

Delivering the opening day’s much-anticipated keynote address, Chris Hein, field CTO of Google Public Sector, provided an engrossing, behind-the-scenes account of Google’s investment in artificial intelligence. He called AI a new, fast-changing “industrial revolution”—every bit on par with the advent of steam power and electricity.

The revolution got a jump-start at Google a decade ago with Atari’s Breakout game and Google’s acquisition of DeepMind Technologies, which led to development of an AI program using reinforcement learning algorithms, Hein said. Eventually the Silicon Valley icon made a whole host of advancements, even winning a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for its work on an AI system that’s able to decode the structure of proteins.

Chris Hein, field CTO at Google Public Sector, shares insights on how AI is reshaping business and everyday life at Convergence AI [Photo: Joseph Haubert/Dallas Regional Chamber]

Additional Google breakthroughs included various AI services such as Gemini, for image generation, and Chirp, for audio signatures—as well as new AI models like Transformer, a novel neural network architecture.

Interestingly, Hein had a word of caution for businesses looking to new AI models as the end-all, be-all.

“Individual models are not what you should make decisions based on, because the best model in the world today—I can almost guarantee you—in three weeks will no longer be the best model. That’s how fast this is all moving,” he said. “So, you have to figure out what your AI platform is. What are the appropriate controls around it making it easy to substitute in a new model when something becomes available? What can supply you with all of the different configurations to make it so it fits for your mission, versus just what Google might have made it for?”

The keynote speaker also made a pitch for responsible AI innovation committed to human dignity, especially in tackling critical issues like human disease. In addition, he urged a collaborative approach to transformation involving industry, tech vendors, and government, citing AI’s potential to turn the disability-claims application process into an interactive experience, for example.

“Let’s remind ourselves where we’re at,” he said. “We’re capable of extraordinary things. We’re living through an age unlike any of you have ever seen. So, the question is, what are we going to build together?”

‘I look at agents as our future coworkers’

One of the buzziest topics at the Irving conference was the increasing importance of so-called agentic AI—or those systems and models that act autonomously to make decisions and achieve goals without needing constant human supervision. During a discussion moderated by James Harding, manager and gen AI technical solutions consultant at Google, panelists said agentic AI represents a leap forward because it doesn’t merely follow instructions, like traditional AI, but makes independent decisions about how to achieve a goal on its own.

“Agentic AI is literally going to impact everything. I can’t think of anything that won’t get impacted,” said John Almasan, senior managing director and head of AI and emerging tech at wealth management giant TIAA, which has a large presence in DFW. However, he said, “While agents can reason and make decisions, humans will be the ones responsible for the end process.”

From left: Nachi Karajagi of PepsiCo, John Almasan of TIAA, and moderator James Harding of Google discuss how agentic AI—autonomous systems that can make decisions and take action—is reshaping the future of work at Convergence AI.
[Photo: Joseph Haubert/Dallas Regional Chamber]

Helping to avoid missing information, incomplete answers, and hallucinations by agents, Almasan added, “will make us more efficient, better in what we are doing, and more importantly, we can become significantly more intelligent and more prolific. I look at agents as our future coworkers, because they will literally work for us.”

At PepsiCo, AI agents are or will be impacting the company’s value chain, from creating new concepts and product designs to placing products in stores, said Nachiket Karajagi, the company’s global senior director of data and AI and head of AI platforms and solutions. For example, the beverage behemoth already is using the technology to enable online customers to order a “hyper-personalized,” one-of-a-kind bottle featuring a unique image of their choosing, Karajagi said.

Since financial institutions are so highly regulated, TIAA has taken a cautious, phased approach to agentic AI, Almasan said, identifying where agents can make “low-risk decisions,” but always with a subject matter expert close at hand. Examples of low-risk decisions made by agents at TIAA include “flows to test a website,” or rebooting a service that’s not performing well, he said.

Karajagi said agentic AI also could be useful at PepsiCo helping front-line salespeople review and submit orders for re-stocking store shelves. “It’s not about having fewer people do the work we do today, but setting up the organization to do a lot more than what we can do now,” he said. “Imagine we can grow our revenue 50% more with the same organization. That should be the goal.”

Higher-paying jobs to be most affected

The reality, however, is that many workers do wonder whether AI ultimately will mean “having fewer people do the work” we do now. Those anxieties were one focus of a presentation about AI’s impact on the labor market by Xavier de Souza Briggs, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

People learning about AI understandably are concerned about what it means for their own economic security and that of their loved ones, Briggs said. “The unknowns—the ‘Now what?’ ‘How do we shape it?’—is largely up to the people in this room, and to your counterparts in other parts of the country and world,” he told the attendees. “It doesn’t sit, for example, in the U.S. Congress—not now, probably not six months from now. It is very much about how industries and particular workplaces, particular developers, and particular employers, decide to use this technology.”

Xavier “Xav” de Souza Briggs [Photo: Michael Samples/Dallas Innovates]

Briggs briefly reviewed the U.S. employment mix over the last 140 years, explaining how the likes of war and technology had affected jobs, with fewer workers needed over time—in sectors from farming to manufacturing—while product quality and safety improved. Now the promise of AI “augmentation”—doing things we could never do on our own—has given rise to claims of world-changing possibilities, he said. Those claims have it that either we’re all going to be on easy street, working two days a week, or that doomsday will bring about mass disruption and dislocation.

According to a 2024 Brookings study of more than 1,000 occupations based on OpenAI-provided data, the labor sectors most likely to be affected by AI deployment are the higher-paying ones, Briggs said. Among them are computing and mathematics, office and administrative support—including a large, racially diverse group of women without college degrees, such as paralegals and HR assistants—business and financial operations, architecture and engineering, and legal.

In contrast to years past, when blue-collar workers were most impacted by automation, those least likely to be impacted by AI are workers in construction, mining, building and grounds cleaning and maintenance, production, installation and repair, and farming, according to the study.

“In other words,” Briggs said, “this is inverted in a really dramatic way.”

At the same time, “most workers feel like their employers are just not talking to them, giving them a line of sight on how they plan to approach AI, even at a high level,” he added.

As a result, organizations should prioritize helping employees become more AI-literate, Briggs said. “There’s all kinds of things we can do right now, despite the long-term unknowns, to engage workers, to think with them about guardrails that are appropriate for your business, for your industry,” he said. “And then, as appropriate, to develop transition plans as well.”

Transforming the operating models

One company that’s helping its employees with AI literacy is Globe Life Inc., the McKinney-based life and health insurer. During a panel on industry disruption, the carrier’s Sonia Khosla said Globe Life is not trying to replace its workers with AI processes, but rather “trying to augment them—transform their work and their efforts.”

In addition to keeping its developers up to date on the potential use of new AI models, the insurer is teaching its “entire user base, all of our employees, how to use AI effectively, so they can transform their own work,” said Khosla, Globe Life’s chief data, AI and analytics officer. “Where can they use AI, and where can they inject their own judgment? Because I still think people might get too complacent as AI becomes smarter and smarter. I mean, we don’t always double-check the answers, right? So, I think [it’s important] to make sure our humans are always challenging that.”

From left: Jody Howard of Caterpillar, Sonia Khosla of Globe Life, Mike Abbott of Thomson Reuters, and moderator Tracy Ring of Accenture discuss how Fortune 500 leaders are navigating AI’s disruptions—and turning them into opportunity—at Convergence AI. [Photo: Joseph Haubert/Dallas Regional Chamber]

Another panelist, Thomson Reuters Institute head Mike Abbott, told how it had been taking his team about 20 hours each month to create certain custom reports. But now, with the use of artificial intelligence, that figures’s been slashed in half—or more, he said. Still other benefits of the “AI revolution” were cited by Jody Howard, VP of innovation and emerging technology at Irving-based Caterpillar Inc. Since the 100-year-old heavy-equipment maker’s first products actually were steam-powered, Howard said, the company is well acquainted with how technology and products evolve over time.

Caterpillar currently has 2 million “connected assets”—tractors and engines—around the world that feed it data every day, she said. “A lot of our systems have been around for a long time, generating information and work that we’ve been doing the same way for a long time. These new technologies in AI, and some of the agents, give us the opportunity to transform some of our operating models in a much more cost-effective way. They also unlock data and information that we didn’t really recognize was there and could be learned from.”

Two areas benefiting from the new AI technologies at Caterpillar, she added, involve condition monitoring and predictive maintenance.

Digital twins for the supply chain

Another panel, focused on “AI’s true ROI,” featured representatives from three industries that are heavily invested in artificial intelligence: healthcare, real estate, and financial services.

Bank of America, one of the first companies of its kind to introduce a mobile-chat conversational assistant, will invest $4 billion this year in AI and new-tech initiatives, according to Tom Ellis, a member of the BofA global technology organization’s consumer, business, and wealth management leadership team.

From left: Tom Ellis of Bank of America, Kapil Lahoti of CBRE, Ladd Laird of McKesson, and moderator Jorge Corral of Accenture unpack what ROI looks like when artificial intelligence meets enterprise goals. [Photo: Joseph Haubert/Dallas Regional Chamber]

When it comes to return on investment and AI, Ellis said, “Ultimately, if you can’t get it, you shouldn’t use it.” Kapil Lahoti of CBRE’s Global Workplace Solutions business said CBRE last year launched its Next Action Engine, an AI-enhanced platform that analyzes vast amounts of data to provide insights for decision-making. The company measures the ROI of the platform, which is now with more than 60 of its clients, based on the incremental sales it’s driven, Lahoti said.

At McKesson Corp., the Irving-based pharmaceutical distributor and healthcare services firm, AI is employed for everything from “driving productivity in our clinician space to making the reservation environment better for our patients,” said Ladd Laird, senior vice president and CIO at McKesson Pharmaceutical Solutions and Services.

The company also has built digital twins replicating its supply chain, using both machine learning and deep learning, and has deployed AI to generate summaries and checklists for community-based oncologists through its US Oncology Network, Laird said.   

[Photo: Michael Samples/Dallas Innovates]

Other highlights of Convergence AI Dallas included the presentation of the 2025 Dallas Innovates AI 75 honorees, a University Summit featuring overviews by research university faculty, and a series of small, salon-style meetings on topics ranging from Coding with AI and AI and Data Innovation to How AI is Entering the Physical World.

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