Graduating students may ‘boo’ every mention of AI but still need timeless advice as jobs turn scarce

Anxiety runs high. The patience afforded to wealthy commencement speakers is being tested. “Back in my day” remarks are more frustrating than ever.

The tense anti-AI sentiment hung in the air ahead of Marquette University’s graduation ceremony on Saturday. Its speaker, Adobe’s global head of AI and agentic systems, Chris Duffey, was announced months ago to a cacophony of criticism.

“This is so embarrassing and frustrating, makes me want to skip the graduation I’ve worked so hard to attend,” said one alumni, commenting on the announcement on Instagram. “A slap in the face to real authors, artists and writers,” another said.

The college decided to press ahead. Kevin Conway, its communications director, told me they felt the choice of speaker reflected the institution’s Jesuit mission to help its graduates “be the next generation of ethical leaders that many industries need.” And, Conway noted, Duffey’s speech was not on AI but the broader application of intelligence and insight.

As Duffey began to speak, some mild booing could be heard on the ceremony’s livestream, and a student gave his remarks two prominent thumbs down. (Duffey could not be reached for comment on Monday.)

The developments and downstream effects of AI have made it an increasingly fraught commencement topic, according to Jeff Shesol, a former speech-writer for President Bill Clinton, whose firm West Wing Writers has written commencement speeches for technology CEOs. “In some cases you’re seeing a disconnect between the world the speakers inhabit,” he said, “and the world the graduates know they are entering.”

His advice? Don’t patronize. “They’re smarter than that.” Instead, speakers must acknowledge the treacherous road ahead.

Over the same weekend, 800 miles or so north of the boos at UCF, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

He got the audience onside quickly by heralding the college’s proud history in computer science. “AI started right here at Carnegie Mellon,” he said to big cheers. He then fell back on a tried-and-tested argument that graduates will be fine as long as they adopt AI themselves. “AI is not likely to replace you, but someone using AI better than you might,” he said.

We can expect similar sentiment from the crop of other tech leaders when they speak to graduates soon. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai will make the short trip from Google’s campus to address graduates at Stanford next month. His old boss, the former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, will speak at the University of Arizona on Friday. Also this month, AMD CEO Lisa Su will deliver remarks at her alma mater, MIT.

They will hope to thread the needle as well as Huang, who seemed popular among the Carnegie Mellon crowd. It perhaps stands to reason that, as founder of the world’s most valuable public company, Huang was a well-received figure to graduates from one of America’s most elite colleges, where the average median salary for alumni in the first five years after graduation exceeds $100,000.

Compare that with the AI-hostile UCF, where graduates on average make half that, according to data from PayScale cited by US News &World Report. Some students might feel more vulnerable than others. Though, of course, the AI revolution could be coming for us all. Thus, offered CleanHarbors founder Alan McKim to graduates at Northeastern, “Your character will matter more than your code.”

That kind of message seemed to resonate the most sincerely. Speakers wading into the subject of AI know they are no less a student of it than the people they are addressing.

What they can offer is the age-old advice that could have been given at any commencement address at any time in the last century or more: Work hard, have integrity and hope for the best. ©Bloomberg

The author is Bloomberg Opinion’s US technology columnist.