A short field note from a research conversation with fresh graduates from Cornell University. Not anxious about AI. Cheated by it. Filed in the same news cycle as Meta's 8,000-person layoff and a wave of commencement-speech boos.
They're not anxious about AI. They feel cheated by it.From the conversation · Cornell · May 2026
Published first on LinkedIn. Reproduced here as a field note, lightly formatted for the page.
The mood among new grads is rough. I've never seen folks this demotivated heading into the job market.
As part of our research on AI deployment, we sat down with some fresh graduates from Cornell University. Honestly? A few things came up that I think are worth sharing.
You could see it the moment we walked in. The second they realized we were there to talk about AI, the faces shifted. Arms crossed, smiles got tighter, energy dropped. We were the "AI people," and that clearly wasn't a good thing to be. It softened as the conversation went on, once it was clear we were there to listen rather than pitch them on something. But that initial reaction stuck with me.
The word that kept coming up was "robbed." These are folks who spent four years (and a small fortune) building skills for careers that, in their words, got replaced before they even got a shot. They're not anxious about AI. They feel cheated by it.
And yesterday's headlines really aren't helping:
→ Meta started notifying around 8,000 employees of layoffs on Wednesday, explicitly framed as a way to fund the company's AI push, with another 7,000 folks getting shifted into AI-focused teams.
→ At graduation ceremonies across the country, speakers are getting booed the moment they bring up AI. Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona. A speaker at UCF calling AI "the next industrial revolution." A music exec at Middle Tennessee State. At Glendale Community College, an AI system butchered or skipped student names entirely, and the crowd booed the president when she blamed the tech.
This isn't a generation that's "afraid of change." This is a generation reacting to how AI has been sold to them.
One thing worth sitting with: the official marketing across the industry says "copilot" and "augment." But the signal folks are actually receiving is replacement. CEOs talking about not backfilling roles. Headlines about agents that "do the work of an entire team." Layoffs explicitly tied to AI investment. You can call it augmentation in the product copy all you want, but if every adjacent story is about displacement, that's the message that lands.
These students aren't wrong to feel what they're feeling. They picked majors, took on debt, and showed up ready to work, and the world they're walking into looks pretty different from the one they were promised. "Adapt" is the word that comes up most often in conversations about how this generation should respond, but what that actually looks like in practice is still an open question.
Curious if others are hearing similar things from the Class of 2026.
Two news items from the same week the conversation took place. Either alone is notable. Together, they explain a lot of the mood in the room.
Meta began notifying around 8,000 employees on Wednesday, roughly 10% of the company's workforce. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's internal memo framed the cuts as a way to fund Meta's AI investment, with another 7,000 employees being redirected into newly created AI-focused teams (Applied AI Engineering, Agent Transformation Accelerator XFN, Central Analytics). Singapore was notified first at 4am local time, then the UK and US. Meta's projected 2026 capital expenditure: $125–145B, more than double 2025.
Multiple incidents in the same graduation season. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona, booed repeatedly when likening AI to the rise of the computer. Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield at UCF, drowned out for calling AI "the next industrial revolution." Music executive Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State, booed mid-sentence about AI rewriting production. And at Glendale Community College, an AI-driven name reader skipped or mispronounced hundreds of graduates' names; the crowd booed the college president for blaming the tech.
Where the news in the backdrop came from. The conversation itself is on file; nothing in the field note above is attributed to a named individual.