Microsoft President Asks Graduates to Stop Fearing AI and Start Adapting

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, has a message for the class of 2026: He hears their boos.

This spring, graduating students across the United States interrupted commencement speeches the moment anyone mentioned AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt got booed at the University of Arizona. A real estate executive got booed at the University of Central Florida. The pattern was consistent enough that Smith, upon returning from Princeton’s reunion weekend, sat down to write about it.

The result is a 3,000-word blog post that starts talking about how things were in 1838 and ends begging students to do all they can to move on with AI and find technology that gives them purpose.

“The reactions of this year’s graduates are a powerful wake-up call for the tech sector,” he writes. “Hopefully, leaders across our industry will listen and seek to learn from this reaction.”

Smith opens by comparing AI to the invention of the camera. French painter Paul Delaroche, upon seeing his first photograph on a metal plate, declared “From today, painting is dead!”—only for photography to eventually push painting toward Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Smith’s point is this: Technology disrupts, then humans adapt and create new things.

But he doesn’t pretend the job market is fine. Graduates face, in his own words, “AI automation of tasks in current entry-level positions” and “corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures.”

He, as one of the faces behind the company driving all of this, calls these changes a “perfect storm.”

The context makes that framing land harder. Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said in February that most professional white-collar tasks—lawyers, accountants, marketers—could be fully automated within two years. The same week Smith’s essay went live, CFO Amy Hood told investors that headcount had declined year-over-year in the company’s fiscal third quarter and that she “expects the trend to continue.”

Microsoft plans to spend roughly $80 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. A Federal Reserve study found that U.S. programming job growth dropped around 50% after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, with researchers estimating some 500,000 developer jobs that would otherwise have existed simply never materialized.

Smith, however, argues that the American dream has always been “more than a better job and greater economic opportunity,” and is more about having purpose.

“To those in the tech sector who seemingly want to pursue a future where computers replace jobs and AI becomes more capable than people, the next generation of people has offered a compelling response: ‘not so fast.’”

But as painful as it may be, he defends AI adoption as something that needs to happen. Smith argues that youngsters want to decide the role of AI, not the other way around.

For this, he argues that society needs to think of novel ways to boost innovation without triggering what can easily be a financial global crisis caused by a lack of jobs and a massive inequality gap: “The technological, economic, and societal transformations of the past three decades have left too many people behind. We’ll need to try different approaches, built on more shared responsibilities, if we’re going to do better as we move forward.”

He didn’t mention which approaches should be implemented.

Smith’s advice for workers is to stop thinking of a job as a title and start thinking of it as a “bundle of tasks.” He borrows the framework from a LinkedIn leadership book called “Open to Work,” which essentially instructs readers to sort your tasks into what AI can do, what you can do with AI, and what only humans can do.

Smith also names five durable human skills AI can’t replace—curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage. He also wants Zoomers to chill out and be positive. “You’re in a unique position to have a positive impact,” he wrote, asking them to stand for “agency, ambition, dignity.”