2026 Commencement: Retire the AI Speech.

As American universities hold their commencement ceremonies, several speakers this year have discovered the challenge of inspiring graduating students about a future increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive from Tavistock Development Company, delivered a speech at the University of Central Florida where she acknowledged that we are living in a time of “profound change,” which she described as both “exciting” and “daunting.”

When Caulfield declared, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” the student audience responded with boos that steadily intensified. This prompted Caulfield to chuckle, turn to her fellow speakers, and inquire, “What happened?”

Acknowledging the reaction, she remarked, “Okay, I struck a chord.” Caulfield attempted to continue her speech, stating, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” but was once again interrupted, this time by enthusiastic cheers and applause from the audience.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt encountered a comparable reception when addressing AI during his speech at the University of Arizona on Friday.

For Schmidt, opposition had already materialized prior to his address, as some student organizations had called for his removal as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit where a former girlfriend and business partner accused him of sexual assault—allegations he has denied. According to local news reports, booing commenced even before he stepped onto the stage.

Nevertheless, Schmidt also drew significant boos when he informed students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The sustained booing prompted him to attempt to speak over it, asserting, “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.”

It is important to note that AI is not universally met with such opposition at every graduation event. For instance, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement and reportedly received no audible negative reaction when he stated that AI has “reinvented computing.”

However, the presence of some student discontent is not entirely unexpected. A recent Gallup poll revealed that only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 believe it is currently a favorable time to find local employment, a significant decrease from 75% in 2022.

This prevailing pessimism is not solely attributed to the emergence of AI—a development that even tech industry professionals are concerned about—but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant posited that AI has evolved into “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”

Merchant elaborated, “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.”

Even in speeches where AI was not explicitly mentioned, “resilience” emerged as a prominent theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged a deep-seated apprehension within the graduating generation, stating, “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."

Meanwhile, Caulfield may have misjudged her audience, which comprised arts and humanities graduates. One student commented that even before discussing AI, Caulfield began to lose their attention with her “generic” commendations of corporate executives such as Jeff Bezos.

Graduate Alexander Rose Tyson shared with The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”