When Reuben Burch describes the moment artificial intelligence stopped being theoretical, he starts on a tarmac in Memphis.

As engineering principal for FedEx Express in 2014, Burch helped launch one of the company’s first autonomous vehicle programs, a “sandbox autonomy” experiment focused on route planning and collision avoidance among the planes, packages and people of FedEx’s largest hub. The work put him at the leading edge of machine learning before the term had become a boardroom staple.

Now TCU’s vice provost for research, Burch is bringing that perspective to TCU.

“Before I was in academia, everyone was panicked about what robots were going to do,” Burch told an audience at a spring AI panel hosted by Fort Worth Report. “I spent a large part of my career explaining: I don’t want to take your job. I want to give you a better job. And here we are again with AI.”

TCU’s response is AI², the university’s new artificial intelligence supercomputing infrastructure, a $10 million partnership with Dell and AWS that gives every faculty member and student access to high-performance AI computing.

Preparing Students for a Prompting Economy
The Candid Conversations panel featured a broad conversation about how Fort Worth institutions are positioning themselves for an AI-driven future. Education was woven throughout the discussion, and Burch argued that the stakes for students are immediate and practical.

“If someone who knows AI is going to take your job,” he said, “then we’re all here because we want TCU students to be the one who gets the job — because they’ve already had it blended and embedded in their classroom experience.”

He framed prompting fluency as a universal professional skill, not a technical specialty.

“He or she who prompts best wins,” he said. “You don’t have to have a STEM degree to understand what prompting will do for you in your career.”

Burch was direct about the responsibility that comes with the capability. Teaching students to use AI, he said, is like teaching them to drive: a powerful tool that requires ethics, judgment and an understanding of data privacy.

“There’s a lot of types of data that, if you accidentally share it, whether you meant to or not, you may get in trouble with the federal government,” he said.

Students will need to learn to verify AI-generated answers rather than accept them.

“Trust but verify, always.”

Cautions Alongside the Promise
Burch offered a pointed warning for any organization moving toward AI adoption: The conversation cannot happen without a cybersecurity conversation running alongside it.

“If you’re having an AI discussion without a cyber discussion, you’re not going to like the results,” he said, noting that many software packages now incorporate AI through routine updates that organizations may not even notice.

He also raised a concern he described as a personal opinion, but one worth taking seriously — that high-performing employees may face accelerated burnout as AI compresses timelines and raises expectations.

“It’s not like in the past where I needed to analyze data, and it could take days,” he said. “Now I can analyze it instantly. High-performing people are going to be at risk.”

Fort Worth as a Test Case
The panel, moderated by Fort Worth Report editor Bob Francis, also drew on Fort Worth’s civic infrastructure. Kelly Baggett, innovation coordinator at the city of Fort Worth, outlined the city’s expanding footprint in drone delivery and autonomous logistics, a sector where Burch’s FedEx background gives TCU a natural research connection. Fort Worth is among a handful of cities where on-demand drone delivery has already launched in residential neighborhoods.

“Every delivery via drone takes a car off the road,” Baggett said. “Less traffic, fewer fatalities, less CO2 — these things have multiplier effects.”

Carlo Capua ’00, the former chief of strategy and innovation for the city and now senior principal at the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, brought a philanthropic lens to the conversation, examining how foundations and civic partners can work together to ensure AI adoption doesn’t deepen existing inequities. Citing research on how young people increasingly turn to AI for emotional support rather than to adults, he offered a complicated defense of that shift.

“If I have a choice between a young person going to AI or not having anybody to listen to them, I’ll take AI every day of the week,” Capua said. “But when you don’t exercise those human muscles, you never develop them.”

Adam Powell, president and CEO of United Way of Tarrant County, described AI’s growing role in the nonprofit sector, including its potential to extend services to communities that have historically lacked access to them. He closed the discussion with a challenge to the room.

“We can be thermometers, or we can be thermostats,” Powell said. “We can lean into AI, lean into these innovations, and if we do that well, I think we can make Fort Worth … the most innovative city in the country.”

Throughout the discussion, Burch returned to a principle he carries from both the factory floor and the research office: Start with the problem, not the technology.

“What problem are you trying to solve?” he said. “And are you secure in using it?”

For TCU, the $10 million investment in AI² is less a bet on technology than a decision about how — and whether — to lead.

-Caroline Collier