Microsoft’s Brad Smith: Graduates jeering AI are ‘telling us what we need to hear’

The interests of Microsoft and graduates rebelling against AI are actually aligned. 

That was one takeaway for Brad Smith, Microsoft president and vice chair, from a recent return to his alma mater, Princeton University, for its reunion weekend. Seniors wore class jackets labeled “100 percent cotton” and “100 percent human,” referencing allegations that an earlier design was created with AI — part of a broader backlash across campuses this spring.

In a blog post this morning, which he started drafting during that visit, Smith writes that graduates booing AI at commencements across the country are “telling us what we need to hear. He points out that Microsoft’s own future depends on people staying employed. 

“Workers have been Microsoft’s lifeblood from the start,” he writes in the post. “If the world’s people don’t have jobs, then neither do we. And if we’re not doing our part to help people use technology to pursue better jobs, then we’re not doing the job we were born to do.”

Speaking with GeekWire this week, Smith acknowledged the tension between that message and job cuts across the tech sector, including at Microsoft. He addressed the issue in the post, as well, citing the industry’s desire to offset capital spending on AI, along with factors including geopolitical uncertainty, trade tensions, and a correction from earlier over-hiring.

“Our industry is going through one of the most extraordinary transformations in its history,” Smith said in the interview, while adding that the “expenses of capital expansion make it more difficult to afford the employment bubbles we’ve had, especially since 2020.”

Smith cited the automation of entry-level tasks among the challenges facing graduates, as well.

But he also took a larger view. Computer science jobs are changing, he said, not vanishing. Coding is becoming a smaller part of the work, while the roles around it — including designing software, managing product development, and reviewing code — are expanding. 

In the post, Smith places AI in a longer line of technologies that reshaped work without ending it, from the camera to the spreadsheet to email. He calls AI the next “general purpose technology,” akin to electricity, and argues its spread will take decades, not years, because the limit is how fast people and institutions change, not how fast the models improve. 

Some jobs go away, he writes, while new ones appear, and many are remade. 

Smith’s advice to workers is to treat a job as a bundle of tasks rather than a title, sorting them into what AI can do, what a person can do with AI, and what only a human can do. For this, he takes inspiration from a new book by LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman, “Open to Work,” and its list of durable human attributes: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage.

The post also offers a clear message for companies, aligning with Microsoft’s own business interests. Smith says organizations need to build their own AI systems on top of frontier models, using their own data and what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls a “hill climbing machine” of evaluations and steady improvement, rather than simply renting intelligence from someone else.

Smith cites intellectual property and data sovereignty as a central concern, arguing that firms must adopt AI without handing their hard-won expertise to a rival’s model. 

In the interview, Smith said the blog reflects months of discussion among Microsoft’s senior leaders, including Nadella and Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, and that it’s intended to speak to the company’s own employees as much as to the outside world. 

Asked what he would have told new college graduates had he been the speaker at a commencement ceremony this spring, Smith said he would have focused on the resilience of humanity more than advances in technology — urging them to speak up for the values they care about, help contribute to a better world, and go forward with hope and optimism.

“That doesn’t mean these challenges may not be significant,” he said, “but I personally believe that the human spirit is far greater than any artificial intelligence the world is likely to create.”

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