Technology leaders who have taken the podium as graduation speakers of late may have figured out AI evangelizing isn’t polling well with young professionals, and tweaked their messaging accordingly. But it turns out, AI isn’t the only point of tension between high-powered speakers and graduates this commencement season.
When asked for comment, a Google spokesperson referred to Pichai’s comments during his speech. Stanford University did not immediately reply to Fortune’s request for comment.
“Today, Sundar Pichai was met with the sight of hundreds of students who showed they could not be allured anymore with the talk of a dollar or rapidly expanding AI,” the group wrote in its statement.
When real estate executive Gloria Caulfield referred to AI as the “next Industrial Revolution” during a University of Central Florida commencement speech last month, the audience replied with loud boos. A few days later at the University of Arizona podium, Eric Schmidt—one of Pichai’s predecessors as Google CEO—had to pause a prepared statement on the inevitability of AI in young people’s lives to make space for the audience’s hisses.
“I know today is about giving you all advice. But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say,” he noted.
Without mentioning the technology by name, Pichai said AI was “truly immaterial” to his speech, in which he pushed graduates to maintain optimism, find exciting pursuits, and to not take life too seriously.
“Anytime we have driven technology progress I think it helps drive progress in the world, and in some ways these graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact of that technology,” he said. “I think we have to be very mindful of that.”
