TCU’s $10 Million AI Investment Takes Center Stage 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