Many Graduating Students Are Booing Business Leaders Who Encourage Them to Embrace AI

In 2026, many graduating students are booing business leaders who, during their commencement speeches, encourage them to embrace AI to shape the future. These students refuse to share any excitement about AI. Last week, Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive at Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida saying that “we’re living in a time of profound change, which can be both 'exciting' and 'daunting.” “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield added. These statements prompted the students to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?” “Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause. Last Friday, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a speech at the University of Arizona. However, the criticism began before the speech, with some student groups calling for him to be removed as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which 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 got loud boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried 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.” However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and he didn’t seem to get any audible pushback when he said that AI has reinvented computing.