In recent weeks, the Class of 2026 has made its displeasure with artificial intelligence abundantly clear, loudly booing speakers touting the technology during commencement speeches. Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith was paying attention.
Brad Smith's Response
“I think this is a moment where the industry needs to rise to the occasion and show that it can address the questions that people have in a serious and credible way,” Smith said in an interview. He elaborated on his thinking in a blog post published on Wednesday, sparked by a recent visit to Princeton University, his alma mater. While there, he learned that graduating seniors had rejected a design for ceremonial jackets because they suspected they had been created with the help of artificial intelligence.
In the roughly 3,100-word essay, Smith argued that AI needs to be deployed to enhance, not replace, humans. He also tempered some of the more dire predictions for immediate job upheaval, saying that it will likely take longer than the industry’s biggest boosters claim for practical AI use to spread through the economy. When its impact does arrive, history shows people will adapt and use the technology to push their own limits. “The good news is that human ambition is irrepressible,” he wrote.
Microsoft's AI Strategy
Smith’s blog is part of an emerging shift at Microsoft, a company that has been weaving AI into most of its software products and plans to spend some $190 billion this year on capital spending, much of it for data centres and other infrastructure. Earlier this year, Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI model development chief, told the Financial Times that most white-collar tasks would be automated within 18 months. More recently, Suleyman walked that back, saying that he was referring only to AI’s ability to perform individual tasks. “That I think is going to free you up to do the more human-like and the more judgment parts of your work,” he said in an interview with The Verge.
Smith and Microsoft remain bullish on AI overall. “It is a boom,” he said, adding that the technology will boost productivity growth and “bring real solutions to the world’s problems.”
Avoiding the Topic
Still, the will-AI-kill-jobs debate isn’t going away, and sometimes it’s safer to avoid the topic altogether. When Microsoft chief financial officer Amy Hood gave a commencement address last month at her alma mater, Duke University, she didn’t mention AI once. No one booed.
