SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — Artificial intelligence is accelerating workplace productivity and transforming product development at unprecedented speeds, but the technology itself will not be responsible for displacing workers—rather, the competitive edge will belong strictly to those who master its application.
That was the central message delivered by technology consultant and product strategist Drew Lentz during the "State of the Regional Workforce" conference held at South Padre Island. The one-day regional gathering was co-hosted by Workforce Solutions Lower Rio Grande Valley and Workforce Solutions Cameron to examine the ongoing shifts across South Texas’s economic landscape.
Addressing regional business leaders, educators, and economic developers, Lentz—founder of Code RGV and a veteran technology strategist with past product management roles at Amazon, Cisco Systems, Meta, and Comcast—presented a session titled "AI & the Future of Work: Preparing the RGV Workforce for What's Next."
Organizers framed the presentation as a forward-looking discussion on how artificial intelligence is reshaping jobs,altering skill requirements, and presenting both immense opportunities and operational challenges for Rio Grande Valley employers and workers.
Lentz illustrated the rapid shift in development capabilities by sharing three personal software projects built and monetized out of his home in McAllen—applications created using modern AI platforms such as OpenAI's ChatGPT,Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok.
Among his builds:
"All three of these projects I've monetized," Lentz said, noting that the initiatives generated over $50,000 in revenue in their first six months. "These are projects that I was able to do by myself, where the only resource I needed was financial—a way to fund my accounts on ChatGPT and Claude."
Addressing widespread workforce concerns regarding job automation, Lentz recounted an experience developing automated data-collection workflows for a voter advocacy group in McAllen. When presented with the choice of requesting grant funds to hire three dedicated staff members to gather, normalize, and upload regional county data, Lentz instead built three custom Grok bots in six hours to automate the entire process overnight.
However, Lentz rejected the premise that the sequence represented a direct loss of employment opportunities.
"I had a moment where I thought, 'I just took away three jobs,'" Lentz told attendees. "But I didn't take away three jobs,because those jobs never existed—except when I talked about it in a coffee shop. By the time we had solved the problem,it was gone."
"The future isn't going to be AI taking jobs away from people," Lentz emphasized. "It's going to be people who know how to use AI taking jobs away from people. The more that you train people to use AI, the more efficient they can be, the quicker they can get stuff done, and the quicker to market they can make products happen."
While AI tools carry immense potential, Lentz cautioned against viewing them as an automatic equalizer across the labor force. Without proactive technical education and adoption, the rapid advancement of generative tools risks expanding skill gaps rather than closing them.
"AI was supposed to be the great leveler... it's not," Lentz noted. "It's a great leveler for the people who know how to use it. The gap that it's creating between the people who understand how to use it and the people who haven't even started yet is growing so wide that by the time you start using it, others are already far ahead."
To help employers structure adoption without disrupting operations, Lentz outlined an organizational roadmap modeled on progressive corporate implementations:
Lentz concluded his address with an urgent warning regarding the critical intersection of AI technology and regional cybersecurity. Pointing to automated exploit tools, sophisticated deepfake voice cloning on corporate conference calls,and municipal phishing incidents across Texas, he urged employers and educational institutions to integrate cybersecurity fundamentals directly into every technical training initiative.
"Be critical of all the information that you're receiving," Lentz warned attendees. "AI can be a superpower for you—it can change your life if you come up with a crazy idea in your bedroom. But it can also affect you every single day from a security perspective."
