2026 commencement speakers should avoid AI mentions

Commencement season has returned, and this year, several speakers have found it challenging to inspire graduating students about a future driven by artificial intelligence.

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, delivered a speech at the University of Central Florida, acknowledging that we are living in an era of "profound change," which can be both "exciting" and "daunting."

"The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield declared, prompting the audience of students to start booing. The noise grew louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, "What happened?"

"Okay, I struck a chord," she said. Caulfield then attempted to continue her speech, stating, "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives" — only to be interrupted once more by the audience, this time with loud cheers and applause.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt encountered a similar reaction when he mentioned AI during a speech at the University of Arizona on Friday.

In Schmidt's case, the backlash actually started before the speech itself, with some student groups demanding his removal as commencement speaker because of a lawsuit where a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage.

But Schmidt also received loud boos when he told students, "You will help shape artificial intelligence." The booing was so persistent that Schmidt attempted to speak over it, insisting, "You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on."

To be clear, AI is not becoming the third rail at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon's commencement, and he did not seem to receive any audible pushback when he said that AI has "reinvented computing."

Still, it is not entirely surprising to find some students in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it is a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from 75% in 2022.

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

"I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM," Merchant wrote.

Even when the speeches did not mention AI explicitly, "resilience" was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged that there is "a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create."

Caulfield, meanwhile, might have also misread her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before mentioning AI, Caulfield had already started to lose them with her "generic" praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.

Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, "It wasn't one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, 'This sucks.'"