When real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told graduates at the University of Central Florida that "the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," the crowd didn't applaud – they booed.
It was one of the first in a series of similar scenes to play out across US campuses last month, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt facing a heckling mid-speech.
The reason behind the discontent shouldn't be surprising – AI is taking jobs.
The US tech sector has announced more than 123,000 job cuts in 2026 alone – up 66 percent on the same period last year – with AI now the most cited reason by employers.
Entry-level positions – the ones graduates walk into – have been among the hardest hit.
Yet some top tech executives still seem to have been taken aback by the chilly reception to AI, raising questions about a disconnect between the tech world and the real world.
The Convenient History Lesson
This week, Brad Smith, Microsoft's Vice Chair and President published a detailed thought leadership piece that aimed to address the anxiety faced by graduates.
Smith opens with the story of Paul Delaroche, the French painter who reportedly declared "from today, painting is dead!" upon seeing an early photograph in 1838. The camera, Smith reminds us, did not kill painting – it sparked Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and entirely new artistic movements.
It is a fair point. But portrait painters did lose work when photography arrived. The transition wasn't painless or instantaneous. And crucially, the timescale over which art reinvented itself – decades – is cold comfort to anyone whose income disappears in the next quarter.
The Numbers Worth Noting
In 2025 alone, Microsoft itself cut approximately 15,000 jobs across multiple rounds of redundancies.
In April 2026, the company offered voluntary redundancy to around seven percent of its workforce, even as it continued pouring billions into AI infrastructure.
A 2026 Motion Recruitment study found that AI adoption is already slowing hiring for entry-level and generalised IT roles – precisely the positions graduates would historically have walked into.
