If you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI

Commencement season is here again – and this year a few speakers have discovered that it’s difficult to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, said gave a speech at the University of Central Florida recognize that we live in a time of ‘profound change’, which can be both ‘exciting’ and ‘daunting’.

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared – prompting the students in the audience to boom, louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers and asked, “What happened?”

“Okay, I’ve struck a nerve,” she said. Caulfield then attempted to resume her speech, saying: “Just a few years ago, AI wasn’t a factor in our lives” – but was again interrupted by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar backlash when he brought up AI during a speech at the University of Arizona on Friday.

In Schmidt’s case, criticism among some student groups actually started before the speech itself calling for him to be removed as speaker because of a lawsuit in which an ex-girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the cheering started before Schmidt took the stage.

But so does Schmidt received loud boos when he told the students: “You are going to help shape artificial intelligence.” The cheering was so incessant that Schmidt tried to talk it out, insisting, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat, you just hop in.”

To be fair, AI is not going to be a third rail each graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at the commencement of Carnegie Mellonand he didn’t seem to get an audible backlash when he said AI has “reinvented computing.”

Still, it’s not exactly surprising that some students are in a shouting mood. In a recent Gallup pollOnly 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from 75% in 2022.

That pessimism is not just a reaction to the rise of AI (a shift that even tech industry workers are concerned about), but journalist and critic of the tech industry suggested Brian Merchant that AI has become “the cruel new face of hyperscale capitalism” for many students.

“I, too, would be cheering loudly at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I were in my early twenties, unemployed, and had bigger ambitions for my future than entering directions for an LLM,” Merchant wrote.

Even though AI was not explicitly mentioned in the graduation speeches, ‘resilience’ was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself recognized that there is “a fear in your generation that the future is already written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is being destroyed, that politics is divided, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”

Caulfield, meanwhile, is also said to have misinterpreted her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before Caulfield brought up AI, she was already starting to lose them with her “generic” praise for business leaders like Jeff Bezos.

Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times“It wasn’t one person who really started the booing. It was just kind of a collective, ‘This sucks.'”