If you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe you can mention AI

The first season is here again – and this year, several speakers found it difficult to get graduates excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we are living in a time of “tremendous change,” which can be both “exciting” and “shocking.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield said — prompting students in the audience to start screaming, talking so loudly that Caulfield scoffed, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”

“Okay, I hit the ground,” he said. Caulfield then tried to continue his speech, saying, “A few years ago, AI wasn’t a thing in our lives” – but was again interrupted by the audience, this time to their loud cheers and applause.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he delivered an AI lecture at the University of Arizona on Friday.

In Schmidt’s case, the criticism began before the speech itself, with some student groups calling for his removal as a speaker because of a case where his ex-girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual harassment. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing started even before Schmidt took the stage.

But Schmidt was disappointed again when he told the students, “You’re going to help shape artificial intelligence.” The roar was so persistent that Schmidt tried to talk it out, insisting, “Now you can assemble a team of AI agents to help you with parts you can’t accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat, you just get on.”

To be fair, AI is not a third channel all of them graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and it seems he didn’t quite get the point when he said AI has “reinvented computing.”

However, it is not really surprising to find some students in bad shape. In a recent Gallup survey, only 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find work locally, a sharp drop from 75% in 2022.

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

“I would also be very excited about the prospect of the next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had ambitions for my future beyond getting into an LLM,” Merchant wrote.

Even when graduation speeches didn’t explicitly mention AI, “hardness” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself admitted that “there is a fear in your generation that the future is already written, that machines are coming, that jobs are evaporating, that the climate is deteriorating, that politics is falling apart, and that you are inheriting a mess you didn’t create.

Caulfield, on the other hand, may also have misread his artistic and humanistic audience. One reader said that before talking about AI, Caulfield had already started to lose them with his “general” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.

Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told the New York Times, “It wasn’t one person who started cracking up.