If you’re talking startups in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI

Commencement season is upon us — and this year, at least a few speakers have found it difficult to get graduate students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, head of real estate company Tavistock Development Company, spoke at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we live in a time of “great change,” which can be both “exciting” and “worrisome.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the industrial revolution,” Caulfield said – prompting students in the audience to boo, scream until Caulfield laughed, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”

“Well, I’m impressed,” he said. Caulfield then tried to resume his speech, saying, “A few years ago, AI was not an important factor in our lives” – only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time with cheers and applause.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a similar response when he brought up AI in a speech at the University of Arizona on Friday.

In Schmidt’s case, the pushback began before he spoke, with other student groups calling for his removal as primary speaker as a result of a case in which his ex-girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of rape. (He has denied the allegations.) According to local news report, The chanting started even before Schmidt took the stage.

But so does Schmidt he sat loudly when he told the students, “You will help create artificial intelligence.” The blowback was so persistent that Schmidt tried to speak up, insisting, “Now you can assemble an AI team to help you with the parts you can’t do on your own.

To be honest, AI will not be the third rail each one graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencementand he didn’t seem to be pushing back when he said that AI has “reinvented computers.”

However, it is not at all surprising to find some students having problems. In a recent Gallup pollOnly 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally, down significantly from 75% in 2022.

That skepticism is not just a response to the rise of AI (the change itself even technical staff are worried), but a journalist and critic of the technology industry Brian Merchant also reported that for many students, AI has become “the brutal new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”

“I’d also be more excited about the prospect of industry change coming if I’m in my early twenties, unemployed, and with more ambitions for my future than getting into an LLM,” Merchant wrote.

Although the speech did not mention AI in detail, “resilience” it was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself he agreed that there is “fear in your generation that the future is already written, that machines are coming, that jobs are evaporating, that the weather is breaking, that politics is broken, and that you are entering a mess you did not create.”

Caulfield, meanwhile, may have misread his audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student pointed out that before he even mentioned AI, Caulfield was already trashing them with his “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.

Another student, Alexander Rose Tyson, he told The New York Times“It is not just one person who started the insult.