Supporting the Next Generation of AI Leaders at Texas McCombs
Artificial intelligence is opening up new possibilities across nearly every industry, and the demand for talent that can guide that change is growing just as quickly. Companies today are looking for professionals who can do both sides of the job well: understand the technology deeply enough to build with it, and understand the business well enough to put it to good use. The academic programs preparing that kind of talent, ones that thoughtfully blend technical AI expertise with operational and strategic fluency, are becoming some of the most valuable in higher education.
This spring, NewTide AI had the opportunity to partner with students from the Texas McCombs School of Business Master of Science in Information Technology and Management (MSITM) program as part of their 2026 capstone initiatives. The experience left us impressed not only with the caliber of the students themselves, but also with the thoughtful way the MSITM program prepares them for the realities of modern enterprise technology.
About the Texas McCombs MSITM Program
The MSITM program is designed for the AI-driven business environment companies are operating in right now. Its curriculum brings together the technical foundations students need, artificial intelligence, cloud-native application development, data engineering, and cybersecurity, with the business skills that connect technical work to meaningful business outcomes strategy, digital transformation, and organizational leadership.
What separates MSITM from many traditional technology programs is its commitment to applied learning. Rather than focusing primarily on theory, the curriculum puts students in front of hands-on projects involving generative AI, unstructured data analytics, distributed systems, and cloud technologies. Just as importantly, students study how those tools shape business decisions, operating models, and competitive strategy. They leave the program understanding both the technology itself and the role it plays in helping a business move forward.
What the Students Worked On
Throughout the semester, students worked alongside the Newtide team on AI and data engineering initiatives focused on the fuels and convenience retail industry. The project addressed real operational challenges that distributors and energy companies face every day, particularly around pricing intelligence, competitor monitoring, workflow automation, and building data infrastructure that holds up under real analytical workloads.
Several student teams contributed to the development of AI-powered fuel pricing intelligence tools designed to automate competitor price extraction and improve market visibility for participants in the oil and gas distribution market. Their work drew on the same technologies and methodologies commonly used in professional enterprise AI work, including Python, MongoDB, Azure Data Factory, FastAPI, React, ETL pipelines, cloud data engineering practices, and emerging multi-agent AI orchestration frameworks.
The team engineered an automated extraction system capable of supporting near real-time fuel price benchmarking, while also designing scalable mutli-tent data architectures that can handle the complexity of operational datasets across many customers. The project additionally focused on orchestrating mutli-agent AI workflows to automate data extraction and dramatically reduce the manual monitoring work that typically eats up analyst time.
What stood out most, beyond the technical execution, was the students’ ability to connect their engineering work to business outcomes. They clearly understood that enterprise AI isn’t really about building models in isolation. It’s about creating systems that improve decision-making, speed up operations, hold up under real-world conditions, and give leaders better visibility into what’s happening in their markets.
Why This Kind of Program Matters
Programs like MSITM are becoming increasingly important because they produce graduates who genuinely understand both sides of the modern technology landscape. The combination of AI foundations, data and cloud engineering, and business strategy gives students the interdisciplinary perspective required to lead technology initiatives inside complex organizations, where technical decisions, business priorities, and operational realities all need to work in concert.
That combination is becoming especially valuable as companies move past the experimental phase of AI and start embedding intelligent systems directly into their operations, supply chains, analytics workflows, and customer engagement platforms. As the focus shifts from exploration to execution, organizations need people who can speak both languages fluently.
The partnership also reinforced something we already believed: experiential learning has no real substitute. By working on live enterprise problems inside a rapidly evolving industry, students gained firsthand exposure to what it actually takes to build AI systems that have to perform in practical business environments, not in the controlled conditions of a course project.
At the same time, Newtide benefited from the students’ creativity, energy, and willingness to approach familiar problems with fresh thinking and modern technical instincts. The collaboration was a clear example of how academic institutions and industry partners can work together to accelerate innovation while preparing students for meaningful careers in enterprise technology.
We’re proud to have supported the Texas McCombs MSITM program and grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with such talented and driven students throughout the semester. A special thank you to Caryn Conley, the MSITM leadership team, and the Texas McCombs School of Business for making this collaboration possible.
This article contains information from “MS in Information Technology & Management”
