Class of 2026: Leveraging Your Humanity in the Age of AI
Why education, relationships, and lifelong learning still matter as AI raises questions about the future of work.
May 31, 2026
Across the country, millions of students are walking across stages and into new chapters of their lives — from high school to college, from college into careers, and into adulthood. They deserve every accolade and congratulatory message for all they’ve worked so hard to achieve.
This graduation season feels different, though. Alongside the celebration, there’s an undercurrent of uneasiness about what comes next. You can hear it in conversations between parents, in commencement speeches, and in the chatter at family dinners and graduation parties.
The Class of 2026 is stepping into a world changing in ways we have never seen before. It’s not just a difficult job market or the stream of unsettling headlines from around the world. It’s the uncertainty around artificial intelligence, which is changing how we learn, work, and create.
All the uneasiness tends to gather around one question: Are these graduates prepared for what’s coming next?
As a grandfather with seven grandchildren at different stages of their educational journeys, I’ve been wrestling with that question a lot lately. There are moments when I feel uneasy about the world these students are entering. Yet I also see real reasons for optimism.
The education behind the education
Much of the anxiety around AI and the future of work comes from a fair question: Will the skills students are learning today still matter tomorrow? The answer depends, in part, on how we define education.
Yes, students studied biology, economics, history, formulas, and plenty else. Those subjects matter because they build knowledge. They also give young people practice in solving problems, testing ideas, asking better questions, and continuing to learn on their own.
I believe the people who will thrive in an AI-powered world will be the ones who combine expertise with the ability to think critically and keep learning. They’ll know how to use new tools without surrendering their own judgment, and they’ll understand that the goal is not simply to produce more, but to decide what is worth producing in the first place.
While machines can write, summarize, analyze information, and generate code, their limits show up when the work requires judgment. For graduates who have learned how to think critically and adapt, their humanity and experiences may be their strongest competitive advantage.
Learning about relationships
Years of education also teach students something that doesn’t appear on a syllabus: how to build relationships, how to maintain them, and how to grow through them.
That begins early. Children learn how to share, read the room, and understand that other people have needs and feelings too. As they grow older, they learn how to navigate friendships, help one another through hard moments, and work with people they may not have chosen for themselves.
Those lessons are reinforced by every teacher who pushes a student to rewrite a draft, every coach who has an honest conversation after a loss, and every classmate who becomes a collaborator and then a friend. These relationships are how young people learn accountability, trust, feedback, and responsibility.
And these skills will become even more important if AI reduces the number of traditional entry-level jobs. Those early roles have long served as training grounds where young people learn from mistakes. If that pathway narrows, graduates will need to rely even more on the relationships and human skills they’ve been building all along to find work, succeed in more advanced roles, or become entrepreneurs.
Prepared for the future
I began this week’s letter with some uneasiness, and I still feel some of it.
No one can tell these graduates exactly what their working lives will look like as technology and the job market evolve. Some paths that once looked reliable may become less certain, and new ones will emerge faster than any of us can predict.
Maybe that is why commencements are so important. They don’t promise graduates a clear path, but remind them that they’ve already begun building the habits, relationships, and resilience they will need to find their way.
None of us had the future figured out when we were graduating. What we needed then — and today’s graduates need now — is the capacity to keep becoming: to learn, to adjust, to ask for help, to build trust, and to stay connected to people who will help them grow.
That’s what gives me hope even in this uncertain world.
All the best,
Jim
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AUTHOR
Jim McCann is the founder and chairman of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. as well as a business leader, author, and philanthropist with a passion for helping people deliver smiles. Devoted to helping others, he also founded Smile Farms, a 501(c)3 organization that provides meaningful jobs in agricultural settings to young adults and adults with developmental disabilities.
