Of course they booed

I keep seeing videos from college commencements where a speaker mentions AI and the crowd boos.

Honestly, good.

The reaction didn’t strike me as immature or anti-technology. If anything, I found myself feeling embarrassed for some of the speakers who seemed completely disconnected from the emotional reality sitting in front of them. These are students graduating into one of the strangest and most uncertain job markets in recent memory, and somehow we’ve decided that this is the perfect moment to enthusiastically remind them that artificial intelligence is rapidly changing — and in some cases threatening — the very careers they’re hoping to build.

Of course they booed.

Commencement speeches are supposed to leave people feeling hopeful about the future. Instead, many young people are entering industries that already feel unstable, increasingly automated, and emotionally disconnected. They spent formative years isolated during COVID, developed professional instincts in remote environments, and are now being told that the work they hoped would help them build experience may soon be compressed, accelerated, or partially replaced by software.

I don’t hear entitlement in those reactions. I hear anxiety, frustration, and honesty.

And honestly, I think they’re right to feel that way.

Careers are built through experience, not optimization

One of the things that concerns me most about the current AI conversation is how little we talk about human development. Nearly every conversation centers around productivity, efficiency, speed, and scale while barely acknowledging how people actually become good at their jobs in the first place.

My own career was built through experimentation, failure, repetition, mentorship, and exposure to a wide range of disciplines long before I found my lane professionally.

My first real job was as a producer during the early days of the web, and I touched everything. I learned HTML, graphic design, UX design, information architecture, content strategy, video production, and basic coding through tools like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I wasn’t exceptional at all of those things, but learning them helped me understand how digital work actually came together. More importantly, it helped me understand people, process, collaboration, communication, and where my strengths naturally lived.

Eventually, I moved into account management and project leadership because people recognized that I was good with teams, planning, communication, and delivery. Even then, I spent years learning through mistakes. I had difficult client conversations that could have gone better. I missed things. I overcomplicated things. I learned how to adapt to different personalities, different pressures, and different organizational dynamics over time because I had the opportunity to work closely with experienced people and slowly build judgment through lived experience.

Not surprisingly, the same thing happened with writing for me. People sometimes look at a book or a polished article and assume that voice arrives fully formed. It doesn’t. My writing improved because editors challenged me, revisions humbled me, and years of practice forced me to figure out what I actually wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I wrote plenty of mediocre things before I wrote anything good. That process shaped my confidence and my career far more than any software ever could.

Those experiences mattered because they gave me time to develop judgment. They gave me opportunities to observe people closely, fail safely, recover, improve, and slowly understand how to navigate work beyond simply producing outputs.

That developmental process feels increasingly fragile right now.

Younger workers are entering a very different workplace

A lot of younger workers are entering the professional world after years of disruption caused by COVID, remote learning, social isolation, and dramatically changing expectations around work itself. I’ve worked with and hired people directly out of college over the past few years, and many of them are still trying to develop the interpersonal confidence and workplace instincts that previous generations often built more naturally through in-person collaboration and shared experiences.

That is not criticism. It’s context.

Now layer AI acceleration and increasingly remote workplaces on top of that reality. Teams are getting smaller, junior roles are becoming harder to find, and apprenticeship opportunities are quietly disappearing. Many younger workers have less proximity to experienced mentors and fewer opportunities to absorb the kinds of lessons that arise naturally in shared environments and everyday collaboration. Some of the most formative moments in a career are often small and unplanned: a conversation after a rough client meeting, feedback delivered in real time, or simply watching how an experienced teammate navigates tension, uncertainty, or conflict. At the same time, entire categories of early-career work are already being automated or compressed into software-assisted workflows before people even have the opportunity to understand why those tasks mattered in the first place.

As a junior project manager, I entered the profession during a time when there was zero automation and fewer sophisticated tools to manage communication for us. In hindsight, that limitation forced me to focus more intensely on people. I had to learn how to read a room, facilitate difficult conversations, manage expectations, communicate consistently, and adapt to shifting dynamics because the software couldn’t do that for me. Over time, I adopted tools and systems that helped me become more efficient, but the human side of the work came first. That foundation shaped the way I lead teams to this day.

I worry about what happens when younger workers are pushed toward optimization before they’ve had enough time to develop confidence, adaptability, emotional intelligence, communication skills, and collaborative instincts through actual human interaction.

And yes, I know every generation worries about the next generation. I’m aware of how easy it is to slip into “kids these days” territory online. But I genuinely believe something different is happening here. Many younger workers already lost important developmental and social experiences during COVID. Now they’re entering workplaces that often feel more transactional, more isolated, and more operationally optimized than ever before.

That combination concerns me.

Efficiency cannot be the only thing we value

I understand why companies are excited about AI. I use it myself. Some of the tools are genuinely helpful, and pretending otherwise would be disingenuous. AI can absolutely reduce administrative overhead, accelerate research, organize information, and support creative exploration in ways that are useful and sometimes impressive.

But the conversation cannot stop at efficiency.

Work is still one of the primary ways people build identity, relationships, confidence, resilience, and community. Careers are not simply pipelines for output! I mean, we're not robots. Our careers are long developmental experiences where we slowly figure out what we are good at, how we collaborate with others, how we solve problems, and how we want to contribute to the world around us.

That process becomes much harder when the primary message younger generations hear is that technology can already do the work they are trying to learn how to do. And honestly, I don’t think enough leaders are being emotionally honest about how destabilizing that feels.

Everywhere I look, people are talking about adapting to AI. Fewer people are asking what we are doing to support human growth alongside it. What opportunities are we creating for younger workers to experiment, fail safely, build relationships, and develop judgment over time? What does mentorship look like inside increasingly lean and remote organizations? How do we preserve collaboration, creativity, curiosity, and humanity while still embracing technology that can genuinely help us?

Those are the questions that interest me far more than whether AI can generate a website or produce an accurate meeting summary, because at the end of the day, people matter. The relationships we build through work matter. Creativity matters. Mentorship matters. The experience of learning alongside other human beings, struggling through challenges together, developing confidence over time, and slowly discovering where we fit professionally and personally all matter deeply. Technology can absolutely support and improve the way we work, but if we become so obsessed with optimization that we strip away too much of the human experience in the process, we risk creating workplaces that are operationally efficient while feeling emotionally empty.

Maybe that’s what those students are reacting to. Not fear of technology itself, but uncertainty about where they fit into a future that increasingly seems designed around replacing formative human experiences instead of investing in them.

Clearly, I don’t have neat answers for any of this. And, yes, I’m tired of talking about AI too. Most days I would rather write about literally anything else. But those commencement videos stuck with me because they exposed something that feels very real beneath all the hype and enthusiasm surrounding these tools.

I think a lot of younger people are looking at the future of work and wondering whether there will still be room for mentorship, creativity, collaboration, experimentation, and human growth in careers that increasingly prioritize speed, automation, and optimization above almost everything else. And honestly, I think they’re asking a fair question that more leaders should be willing to sit with: if work eventually becomes little more than a highly optimized system for generating outputs faster and cheaper, then what exactly are we building all of this for in the first place?

T L ; D R - AI can absolutely make work faster and more efficient, but younger generations are entering industries where opportunities for mentorship, collaboration, creativity, and real professional growth already feel increasingly unstable. If we continue optimizing work primarily around speed, automation, and cost reduction without investing equally in human development, connection, and experience, then what are we actually building? More efficient companies? Sure. Better workplaces? Better careers? Better lives? I’m not so sure.