By Jerry Prochazka
El Paso keeps losing the workers it needs most. The Texas Demographic Center projects that the county’s growth will continue to slow in the coming decades. Internal Revenue Service county-to-county migration data show residents leaving for San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and the Permian Basin. The Dallas Fed, after visiting the region, identified the brain drain of skilled labor as one of El Paso’s central economic challenges, alongside gaps in digital infrastructure and low educational attainment.
Pay and opportunity remain the obvious drivers of outmigration. But another factor deserves more attention: AI readiness is becoming a labor-market advantage.
Firms using AI report measurable productivity gains, and jobs tied to AI skills increasingly carry wage, job-quality and hiring advantages. That does not prove El Pasoans are leaving specifically because of AI adoption gaps. It suggests that places whose employers move faster on AI will offer more attractive career paths than those whose employers do not.
For El Paso’s many small businesses, that is a competitiveness issue, not just a technology issue.
Salesforce reports that 75% of small businesses are at least experimenting with AI, with growing businesses leading at 83%. Growing small businesses plan to increase AI investment at significantly higher rates than declining peers.
In a tight labor market, that gap translates directly into competitiveness. A 20-person logistics company near Fort Bliss that has not integrated AI into scheduling, documentation or customer communication is competing for the same workers as companies in Dallas that have integrated it. The workers notice. They notice that the work is harder, slower and less interesting at the company that has not caught up.
This is not hypothetical. The $200 billion video game industry, which employs artists, engineers, designers, writers and business strategists, was one of the first sectors to be reshaped by AI across every function. The cities that built creative technology ecosystems around that transformation – Austin, Seattle and Los Angeles – did so by investing in AI-literate workforces and the institutions that support them. Those cities are now magnets for the exact kind of multidisciplinary talent El Paso needs and keeps losing.
El Paso has raw ingredients most cities would envy. UTEP is a top-tier research institution with a student body that reflects the region’s demographics. The workforce has deep bilingual and bicultural capability, which is a competitive advantage in a cross-border economy. The El Paso Chamber and a strong network of business development organizations provide infrastructure that many communities lack. Fort Bliss and the Santa Teresa port of entry anchor sectors where AI delivers the most concrete efficiency gains: logistics, supply chain visibility, documentation and customer communication.
But raw ingredients do not retain talent on their own. What retains talent is the sense that a city’s businesses are keeping pace. Those skills developed here will be valued here.
The AI tools themselves are not the barrier. ChatGPT costs $20 a month. The barrier is that a restaurant owner near Fort Bliss does not know which of the 10,000 available AI tools can solve their scheduling problem, and does not have 40 hours to figure it out. What is missing is practical, local translation: experts who can sit with a business owner and identify the specific tools that will save them time, then show them how to implement those tools at a price that makes sense for a 15-person operation.
That translation is starting to happen. I recently gave a talk at Doña Ana Community College on how AI is reshaping the video game industry, using gaming as a case study of how AI affects any multidisciplinary business. The room was small, about a dozen professionals, but the conversations were revealing.
An FBI agent asked how to bring AI adoption to the bureau. The chief operating officer of Mesilla Valley Hospice described the work he is already doing to operationalize AI across his organization. When I walked through the four disciplines required to use AI effectively, the response was immediate: people recognized that the gap between casual and transformative AI use is a skills problem with a concrete solution. That kind of programming needs to happen at scale across the Borderplex.
El Paso’s economic development agenda already includes workforce development and infrastructure investment. It needs to include AI readiness, not as a technology initiative, but as a talent retention strategy. The communities that invest in AI literacy for their small-business base over the next two to three years will retain and attract the workers who will define the next twenty. The communities that treat AI as someone else’s problem will keep watching their best people leave for cities that take it seriously.
El Paso’s value proposition has always been that of a bridge between two countries, two economies, and two labor markets. AI will either sharpen that bridge or widen the distance between here and everywhere else. The window to decide which one is closing faster than most people realize.
Jerry Prochazka is the founder of Strategy & The Machine, an AI consulting practice for small and medium businesses in the Las Cruces and El Paso region.
The post Opinion: El Paso must invest in AI readiness to retain workers appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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