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