About Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and co-founder of Schmidt Futures, delivered the commencement address at the University of Arizona in May 2026. During the speech, he discussed the potential of artificial intelligence, stating that AI is "already accelerating research at a rate that we could not have imagined even 5 years ago" and that it is "designing new molecules, running simulations, identifying patterns in genomic data that no team of humans will uncover in a lifetime." He also acknowledged fears about technology, saying, "There is a fear in your generation... that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating." Reports indicate that portions of his speech were met with boos from the graduating class. In other appearances, Schmidt discussed the global AI race, describing it as "really an energy race" and noting that the "current number one problem in the AI companies" is a "lack of data centers." He also commented on government concerns about AI, stating that governments "want to win, but they're also concerned about safety for their populations and can it be misused."
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Eric Schmidt's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Eric Schmidt0:13
I'm Eric Schmidt, class of 1976. I was an electrical engineering major because there was no computer science. Now there is, and I'm now the CEO of Google. It seems to me that people go to college and then they join their firms, and between the ages of 25 and 35 they learn a lot, and then all of a sudden they want everything not to change. And inevitably something new comes along—a new idea, a new fashion, a new country, a new war—whatever that upsets everything. So the lesson to be learned after years of watching this is that the norm has changed. So what we want to do is we want to constantly reinvent ourselves. Now it's easy to say that. How do you do it? In our case, we encourage our employees to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they're interested in, not what their boss wants them to work on. Out of that, most of our great new products have come.
Many different leadership styles work. There's not one leadership style that is the way in which corporations and institutions succeed. You'll have passionate, charismatic, and disorganized leaders. You'll have boring and rational and precise leaders. What really matters about a leader is their commitment to getting to the right answer and to doing it in the right way. And however they get there, if they get to the right answer, people respect them along the way. You'll have conflict, and you can resolve it in many different ways. If you don't seek out the conflict, you won't excel, because without the conflict—at least the ideas in conflict—you won't hear the best ideas.
When I thought about where to go to college, everyone assumed I would go to a technical school, some place where people with my interests would go. But I was attracted to Princeton precisely because engineering was not its primary focus. And I believe that the value of a liberal arts education—just in general, just learning about the world and learning about other people—would serve me in some innate way, some way in which I didn't really know. And that's proven true. The skills, and in particular the social experiences and the exposure to the non-technical part of the world as a young person, made a huge difference for me. In my case, I met a brilliant professor who got me interested in computing and got me interested in the foundations of the kinds of things I did after I left Princeton. So it was the combination of critical thinking and the fact that you had such good access to professors who you could really talk to that, as a very young person, had a huge impact on me. My name is Eric Schmidt, and I'm a Princeton engineer.
