Microsoft President Asks Graduates to Stop Fearing AI and Start Adapting

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

This spring, graduating students in the United States interrupted their speeches when someone mentioned AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona. A real estate manager was booed at the University of Central Florida. The pattern was so consistent that when Smith returned from Princeton’s reunion weekend, he sat down to write about it.

The result is a 3,000-word blog post that starts with how things were in 1838 and ends with a plea for students to do whatever they can to move forward with AI and find technology that gives them purpose.

“The responses from this year’s graduates are a powerful wake-up call for the technology sector,” he said writes. “Hopefully, leaders in our industry will listen and try to learn from this response.”

Smith opens by comparing AI to the invention of the camera. When French painter Paul Delaroche saw his first picture on a metal plate, he declared: “From today, painting is dead!” – only for photography to eventually push painting towards impressionism, cubism and surrealism. Smith’s point is this: technology disrupts, then people adapt and create new things.

But he does not pretend that the labor market is doing well. Graduates face, in his own words, “AI automation of tasks in today’s entry-level positions” and “pressure from industry to reduce workforces to help pay for AI’s massive capital expenditures.”

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

Context makes it more difficult to frame country. Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said in February that most white-collar professional jobs (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 was down year-over-year in the company’s third fiscal quarter and that she “expects this trend to continue.”

Microsoft plans to spend roughly $80 billion on AI infrastructure by 2026. A Federal Reserve study shows that employment growth in U.S. programming fell by about 50% after ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Researchers estimate that it has created some 500,000 developer jobs that would simply never have existed otherwise.

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

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

But as painful as it may be, he defends the adoption of AI as something that needs to be done. Smith argues that young people want to determine the role of AI, and not the other way around.

That’s why he argues that society must come up with new ways to stimulate innovation without triggering a global financial crisis caused by a lack of jobs and a huge inequality gap: “The technological, economic and social transformations of the past three decades have left too many people behind. We will have to try different approaches, based on more shared responsibilities, if we want to do better in the future.”

He did not specify which approach should be implemented.

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

Smith also lists five enduring human skills that AI cannot replace: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communication and courage. He also wants Zoomers to be relaxed and positive. “You are uniquely positioned to have a positive impact,” he wrote, asking them to stand up for “freedom of choice, ambition and dignity.”