Those viral graduation videos of students booing AI-boosting commencement speakers made for great content. They also told roughly a quarter of the story. New research from American University's Kogod School of Business, shared first with Axios, finds that the share of business students regularly using AI has nearly quintupled in three years, jumping from 6.2% to 29%.
The Boos Were Real. So Was the Laptop Open to ChatGPT.
Here is the tension at the center of American higher education right now: students are genuinely anxious about AI, and they are also genuinely using it. A lot. Those commencement jeers that spread across social media last spring were not fake. The frustration behind them was real. But as Axios reports, they didn't represent the full picture of how students are actually behaving when the cameras aren't on them.
The Kogod School of Business data covers undergraduate and graduate business students, and the trajectory is steep. Three years ago, barely one in sixteen students was regularly using AI tools. Now it's closer to one in three. That is not a fringe behavior. That is a cohort shift.
Why Business Students Specifically? Follow the Incentives.
Business school students are not exactly known for ignoring market signals. If AI proficiency is appearing in job listings, internship evaluations, and recruiting conversations, you can bet a room full of finance and marketing majors will notice before the semester is out. The Kogod research confirms what anyone paying attention to corporate hiring has been watching: AI is increasingly framed not as a threat to jobs but as a prerequisite for getting one.
This is where the graduation boo narrative gets genuinely complicated. Students can hold two things at once. They can resent Silicon Valley executives showing up at their commencement to tell them the technology eating their field is actually great for them, and also quietly recognize that they need to learn to use it anyway. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug, and the job market is a hell of a motivator.
The anxiety isn't irrational. The concern isn't that AI doesn't work. The concern is that it works too well and that the people getting rich off it have almost no accountability for what happens next. You can be furious about that and still open up an AI writing assistant before a deadline. Most people can hold a grudge and a keyboard at the same time.
What Students Actually Want: Rules, Not a Sales Pitch
According to the Axios report on the Kogod research, students aren't rejecting AI wholesale. What they want is guidance on how to use it responsibly. That is a pretty reasonable ask, and it is one that most universities have fumbled badly.
The institutional response to AI in higher education has been, to put it charitably, a mess. Some schools went full prohibition. Some issued vague honor code updates no one read. Some just hoped the problem would resolve itself. Almost none of them sat down and said, here is a thoughtful framework for when this helps you learn and when it rots your brain and your skill set. Students noticed the vacuum. They filled it themselves, as students tend to do, with varying degrees of judgment.
The demand for responsible use guidance is actually the more interesting data point in this whole study. Students are not asking for permission to cheat. They are asking for adults in the room to engage seriously with a technology that is reshaping the world they are about to enter. That is not an unreasonable request. The fact that so few institutions have answered it coherently is the real scandal here.
Three Years Is a Very Short Time for This Much Change
Let's put the 6.2% to 29% jump in some context. That kind of adoption curve in three years, in a single demographic, is not gradual cultural drift. That is a step change. For comparison, smartphones took the better part of a decade to reach saturation in college populations, and that was a hardware product people had to physically acquire.
AI tools are free or cheap, available on any browser, and increasingly woven into software students already use. The barrier to entry is essentially zero. The surprise, honestly, is that 71% of business students still report not regularly using it. Give it another three years.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe the graduation boos meant something definitive about Gen Z and AI. They didn't. Or rather, they meant something true and incomplete at the same time, which is how most cultural moments actually work. The students booing were expressing something genuine about power, about being handed a technological fait accompli by billionaires and told to feel grateful. That anger is legitimate. It is also not the same as refusing to use the tool.
What the Kogod data actually reveals is a generation doing exactly what you'd expect rational people to do: adapting to their circumstances while also resenting those circumstances. That's not hypocrisy. That's survival. The real failure here belongs to the institutions that had three years and counting to develop coherent, honest AI curricula and mostly produced nothing but panicked honor code amendments and wishful thinking.
Business schools in particular should be embarrassed. Their entire pitch is that they prepare students for the real world of commerce. The real world of commerce is currently being restructured around AI at a pace that makes most business school curricula look like they were written in a log cabin. If students are figuring out responsible AI use on their own, through trial and error, with no institutional scaffolding, that is not a student problem. That is a leadership failure, and someone with a dean's salary should probably own it.
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