AI is a lot of things these days. One thing it isn’t is an applause line.

In recent weeks, multiple graduation speakers have tubthumped on behalf of generative AI during their commencement speeches, only to be met with choruses of boos. It doesn’t help that the speakers have doubled down; one record executive responded to the Bronx cheers by saying, “deal with it.” (Least. Inspirational. Graduation. Speech. Ever.) It didn’t help that the announcement of graduates’ names at one ceremony was botched—because the job got offloaded to AI.

It’s easy to understand the frustration: Entering the job market is always stressful, and it’s only worse to do so at a time when AI is perceived as a replacement for exactly the kind of entry-level roles that new graduates are looking for. “These tech executives are not reading the room,” as one expert told the Guardian.

It’s true that those changes are top of mind for leaders: According to Mercer’s new Global Talent Trends 2026 report, nearly all CEOs surveyed (99 percent) said they expect to be making AI-driven layoffs in the next two years. 

That’s reason enough for grads to feel gloomy about their prospects. But the report suggests it might make more sense for long-tenured and emerging professionals alike to steer their concern in a different direction: passive leaders who seem to accept AI as an unavoidable buzzsaw rather than develop a workforce that can leverage it.

According to the Mercer report, employees actually aren’t that dispirited about AI: 82 percent of them said it will improve how their job is done in the next two years. But CEOs come at it with a seeming distrust of the human part of the equation: Only a third (32 percent) say “their workforce can effectively combine human and machine capabilities.”

The Mercer report challenges leaders to use their position to build the kind of well-integrated workforce that uses AI to advantage without presuming that people are resource-sapping, imperfect widgets. Employees in the survey say they want training and see the promise in automation; many said they’re willing to accept a 10 percent pay cut if it means they’ll be properly upskilled. 

But that will require leaders to do some upskilling themselves: rethinking what a workforce looks like now and in the future. “Instead of structuring work around fixed jobs, rigid processes and narrowly defined roles, work should be seen as a fluid system of tasks to be tackled by human and/or machine capability,” the report says. “Don’t focus on how technology could be applied to existing jobs and processes to eliminate human work. Start with asking: what work needs to be done?”

For an association executive, the challenge is doubled: Not only do they have to create a sensibly AI-integrated workforce within their own staffs, they’ll need to help their industry’s leaders reckon with it as well. AI strategy isn’t the same thing as a circa-2000 internet strategy. Back then, the challenge was making sure workers were empowered to use the internet to accomplish tasks. Now that AI can perform tasks itself—or persuade you that it can—a more sophisticated conversation about workforce is necessary.

Many of those graduates are booing AI, yes. But I’d like to think a lot of them are booing the idea that the only thing to be done with AI is to submit to it. Leaders will need to create the environment where people feel they’re being well-integrated into the new environment. That’s a job only a human can perform.