In recent weeks, a list of today’s most prominent tech figures — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others — took the stage at college commencement to address an anxious class of 2026. The first group spends their entire college years alongside generative AI tools. (ChatGPT launched in November 2022, during their first year.) Across campus, the industry leaders behind those platforms offered a broadly similar message: embrace AI, but learn how to master it. However, how this message was received depended not so much on what was said as on who said it, and perhaps on the place in which it was said.
The stark contrast between Schmidt at the University of Arizona and Hwang at Carnegie Mellon University was evident. While Schmidt’s burgeoning optimism about artificial intelligence drew loud cheers and boos throughout his speech, Huang’s similarly upbeat message was met with quiet respect.
Further south, at Middle Tennessee State University, Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group (which famously launched Taylor Swift), faced criticism when he asked graduates to “deal with it” while discussing the disruption that artificial intelligence has brought to the creative industries.
Meanwhile, at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak earned sustained applause with a line that cleverly flipped the narrative: “You all have artificial intelligence, real intelligence.”
These polarized reactions were not the result of any single speech. If you listen closely to what they said, the text of those prepared remarks was very similar. What differed was the tone of the delivery and how the audience heard it. If there is a pattern, students at elite institutions seemed more receptive to pro-AI messages than their peers at public universities. Hwang spoke at a school widely considered to be one of the birthplaces of artificial intelligence (where researchers created the first AI computer program in the 1950s). And last week, his rival (and distant relative), AMD’s Lisa Su, gave the commencement speech at her alma mater, MIT, where she was also warmly celebrated.
Of course, the person behind the podium was equally important. Graduation speeches, especially at university, are among the rare moments when tech CEOs shed their corporate armor and offer something resembling personal advice. But it also represents an unforgiving referendum on reputation. Hwang and Su, who are actively building the infrastructure that supports the AI boom, are seen as shaping the future in tangible ways while taking real business risks. By contrast, Schmidt has long been viewed as an out-of-touch capitalist and the poster child of an older, unfeeling era of Big Tech. His strangely rushed, sometimes tone-deaf delivery in Arizona amplified that perception.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools over the past three to four years has reshaped how students choose majors and think about careers. Although overall unemployment in the United States remains relatively low, Entry-level hiring has diminished severely. (We blame remote work, too, because employers are reluctant to hire new graduates into remote teams due to training challenges.) According to a recent study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank,Unemployment rate among university graduates aged 22 to 27 years The inflation rate rose to 5.7%, reaching its highest level since 2014Except for the pandemic years.
Against this backdrop, advice from technology leaders converges on a simple theme: anticipate disruption, and adapt.
“I started my career at the beginning of the PC revolution. Your career begins at the beginning of the AI revolution. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to start your life’s work,” Huang said. “AI is unlikely to replace you, but someone using AI is better than you.”
“Technology by itself does not decide what the future will be like. The best people do that,” Su emphasized. “It needs people who know what they’re going to be used for — people with purpose, judgment and courage; people who look at a difficult problem and say: This is important, and we can figure it out.”
Stripped of the ridicule that greeted her in Arizona, Schmidt’s basic message was not much different: AI “will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship.” But he added that it is only useful if people work to understand it. “I think the main thing is that as human beings we need to keep that kind of sense that working hard, going through the hard work of learning things, is worthwhile and pays off, and that’s how you really improve yourself.
