Eric Schmidt walked into a tough room on Friday. The former Google CEO delivered the commencement address at the University of Arizona, and when he started talking about AI, students booed him. Repeatedly.

It’s one thing to get pushback in a hearing room or a press conference. It’s another to get booed by people who just spent four years preparing for a job market that AI companies keep saying they’re about to transform.

Schmidt acknowledged the anxiety, according to Business Insider. He mentioned fears “that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking.” But acknowledging the problem doesn’t fix it, and the graduates weren’t having it.

This wasn’t a protest organized by activists. It was a visceral reaction from people about to find out whether their degrees still mean what they thought they would. That’s a different kind of skepticism than what you hear from policymakers or academics.

The credibility gap keeps growing

The tech industry has a trust problem, and it showed up in court last week too. The final days of the Elon Musk-OpenAI trial centered on whether Sam Altman is trustworthy. That’s not a legal technicality. It’s a question about whether the people building these systems can be believed when they talk about safety, ethics, or what they’re actually going to do with the technology.

Musk’s lawsuit argues that OpenAI abandoned its original mission. Whether or not that’s legally actionable, the underlying question resonates: did the company promise one thing and deliver another? That’s the same question students are asking when someone like Schmidt shows up to tell them AI will create opportunities while they’re watching entry-level jobs get automated.

Privacy as differentiation

Apple is betting it can win some of that trust back. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the revamped Siri coming in iOS 27 will let users auto-delete chat histories. You’ll be able to save conversations for 30 days, a year, or forever. That’s different from most AI assistants, which store everything by default and maybe offer an incognito mode.

It’s a small feature, but it signals Apple’s strategy: position privacy as the reason to use their AI instead of someone else’s. That might actually work. People are more aware now that every conversation with an AI assistant is training data unless you explicitly opt out. Apple is making the opt-out easier.

The question is whether privacy concerns will outweigh functionality. Apple is still catching up on capabilities. But if the gap narrows, and people have to choose between a slightly better assistant and one that doesn’t keep records, some will pick the latter.

Microsoft is simplifying

Microsoft is retiring Teams’ Together Mode, the feature that used AI to put everyone’s heads in a virtual conference room during the pandemic. It launched when companies were desperate for anything that made remote work feel less isolating. Now it’s being cut as part of a “simplified Teams experience.”

Together Mode was always a bit gimmicky. The AI would cut out your head and shoulders and drop you into a virtual auditorium or coffee shop. It felt less like being together and more like being in a video game cutscene. But it was also an example of how much money got thrown at pandemic-era collaboration tools, and how quickly companies are walking that back now.

The broader point is that Microsoft is pulling back features, not adding them. That’s unusual for enterprise software, where the default is always to ship more. It suggests the company is responding to feedback that Teams got too complicated, or that it’s reallocating engineering resources to AI features people actually use.

What it adds up to

The booing at the University of Arizona wasn’t about Eric Schmidt personally. It was about a growing disconnect between how tech executives talk about AI and how everyone else is experiencing it. The executives see potential. The students see uncertainty. The lawsuit against OpenAI is about broken promises. Apple’s privacy push is a bet that skepticism has market value.

The industry built a lot of goodwill over the past two decades. It’s burning through it fast. When graduates boo a commencement speaker for being too optimistic about technology, that’s not just a bad news cycle. It’s a sign that the assumptions holding up the AI boom aren’t as widely shared as the people making the boom think they are.