Attendees walk through a military community hiring event hosted by DAV and RecruitMilitary in August at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.
Michael Cuviello/Dallas Morning News
It’s been the digital elephant in university classrooms, corporate offices and staffing agencies: As AI continues to redefine modern life, what exactly does it mean for people’s jobs?
A recent analysis from the Dallas Fed offers new insight on the tech’s impact within Texas: So far it’s been responsible for at least some reduction in overall job openings in the state, the bank’s researchers found, while certain sectors — and recent college grads — are getting hit harder.
“We’re not talking about a job apocalypse,” Samuel Dodini, a senior research economist at the Dallas Fed and a co-author of the analysis, told The Dallas Morning News. “But it does represent a statistically significant slowdown in hiring.”
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The bank’s analysis, based on a review of millions of online job postings and published in September in two companion reports, determined that in 2025 generative AI was responsible for an approximately 2.6% reduction in Texas job postings. In 2024, the researchers found, the figure was 1.8%.
But for some industries and firms the impact has been significantly higher. Roughly one year after the late 2022 public release of ChatGPT, Texas job postings had fallen 5% for more-exposed positions relative to less-exposed positions, the report found. By early 2025, that figure was 8%.
Similarly, relatively more AI-exposed Texas firms have also been posting fewer openings, with those firms reducing their job postings by approximately 5% to 6% by mid-2024 and 8% to 9% by early 2026.
“We should be careful to say this is not just, like, tech jobs,” emphasized Dodini. “There are a lot of jobs that have a fairly high component of stuff that can be automated by these types of tools.”
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He pointed to roles such as web developers and various managers who work for tech firms but are also employed across a wide range of companies and industries. “And so I think that gives us more confidence that we’re not just picking up like a sectoral or industry-specific shock,” Dodini added. “This is really something that’s broad-based.”
Some recent Texas college graduates are also being disproportionately impacted by the tech, the Dallas Fed researchers found. Since late 2022, students at Texas public universities whose majors are more AI-exposed have experienced a 1.7 percentage point drop in their likelihood of finding employment within a year of graduating compared to less-exposed graduates, the analysis concluded. The relatively more AI-exposed students who found jobs after 2022 also earned 5% less compared with their less-exposed peers.
The more exposed majors were computer science, computer engineering and languages — translators face a particularly steep job risk — the analysis found, while nursing, education and psychology were among the least-exposed.
“We’ve been telling people to learn to code for the past decade or so,” said Tucker Smith, a research economist at the Dallas Fed and the other co-author of the analysis. “And now there’s some reversal of that, it seems.”
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The report also found that recent undergraduates with more exposed majors were more likely to pursue graduate degrees, although they mostly continued studying the same field, which may offer a limited financial upside, the researchers noted.
They also emphasized that so far AI’s impact on the labor market appears to manifest more by reducing new positions rather than through layoffs — a trend that’s felt much more by younger job seekers.
“This really early on is falling on junior workers,” said Smith. “There haven’t been these layoffs — there aren’t a lot of, you know, software engineers kind of in midcareer or senior [level] that are being displaced in large scale. … It’s more these people that would be flowing into these positions that aren’t able to get them now, and so they need to kind of retool.”
The analysis comes as public concern around AI metastasizes even as the technology becomes more ubiquitous, including in D-FW. In late May, a different analysis from the Dallas Fed found that two-thirds of Texas businesses, representing a range of industries, were using AI to at least some degree, up from 40% two years earlier. Among major companies, including North Texas’ two dozen Fortune 500 companies, the usage rate is likely 100%.
Yet while the technology continues to drive economic investment and has lately propelled the stock market to new records, surveys show that many Americans are also growing more skeptical. One poll released this month, from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that 64% of adults now believe AI is developing too quickly.
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The finding comes soon after a new wave of AI executives and whistleblowers have warned, often in stark terms, about the tech’s potential existential threat to humanity, and as the data centers powering the AI rush continue to stoke a fierce cultural and political backlash. Thanks in part to its abundant land and relatively cheap energy, North Texas, which already ranks among the country’s biggest data center hubs, is poised to become an even bigger player, with some analysts predicting the region will become the largest data center market in the world within several years.
“There’s a lot of nuance to it,” Brant Bernet, an executive vice president at the commercial real estate firm CBRE, told The News last month. “Because you need the tech talent. You need the people that can build it. You need people that can run it once it’s up and running. You need engineers. You need security teams and all of that. And I think that because there’s such a preponderance of that in Dallas, it’s just an easy place to go.”
For the report, Dallas Fed researchers analyzed an online jobs data set from Lightcast, a labor market intelligence company, and determined various occupations’ level of exposure to AI by using a metric developed by the AI firm Anthropic that maps job tasks in the Department of Labor’s widely used O*NET occupational dataset.