It’s May 8, a day of celebration for thousands of students who are graduating from the University of Central Florida. Commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, a local real estate executive, is talking about the world of possibilities awaiting graduates.
Then, she hits her main point, calling artificial intelligence “the next industrial revolution,” and she touches a nerve. The room erupts in boos and jeers.
And when she recalls that “only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” the mood swings the other way: the crowd begins cheering and whistling.
Anthony Zarczynski is one of the thousands of people at that commencement address. He graduated from UCF this spring with a degree in digital media, a blend of computer science and graphic design.
“What I entirely did not expect was that everyone — and I mean everyone, including both the graduates and graduates’s guests — began booing,” he said. “It was an absolutely insane experience. I did not see a single person who was not booing at the time.”
Zarczynski and other recent graduates say students are more anxious than ever about finding work.
“They're changing the playing field so quickly that I think it feels very much overwhelming for graduates to keep up,” he said.
He started applying for work in March, looking for jobs around his hometown near Jacksonville. One hundred ninety-eight applications later, he still hasn’t gotten an offer.
“It feels like a full-time job,” he said.
A looming deadline
By most standards, Zarczynski is able to live pretty cheaply right now. His monthly expenses come out to less than $1,800.
Like most of us, the majority of that is going to housing. He’s moving out of his Orlando apartment in a few weeks, where he and three roommates were paying about $800 a month each in rent, and into an apartment in the Jacksonville area for about half that.
He’s spending another $300 a month on health and car insurance, and another $150 a month on gas.
Food and other basics comes out to a frugal $120 per month.
“I don't mind eating just, let's say, rice with beans,” he says with a laugh.
Since graduation, Zarczynski has been working part-time for UCF, earning about $600 a month, which means he’s been dipping into his savings.
“Right now, the job I'm working is just barely enough to cover the basic expenses,” he said. “So … it's sort of a little deadline that I am working on.”
A national trend
Across the country, thousands of grads are facing similar challenges. A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found a 5.6% national unemployment rate for recent college graduates as of March, compared to a 4.2% for all workers.
And another study found that 2026 college graduates are applying for more jobs earlier and getting fewer offers than in the past five years.
But until recently, it was hard to confirm, beyond anecdotes, whether AI was a major factor in those waning job prospects — and, if it is, which industries it’s hitting hardest. Other factors have made for a more difficult job market, too, like a wave of big layoffs in the retail and tech industries.
There are “major gaps” in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data that could offer insight on those effects, as the department acknowledged in a 2020 report: “BLS currently has limited information on real‑time demand for work beyond macro-economic measures, such as total employment and employment by sector.”
But a Stanford study last year sidestepped that problem by going directly to monthly payroll information from ADP, the U.S.’s largest payroll software provider. The paper, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” concludes that AI is measurably hurting job prospects for recent graduates in a host of “exposed” industries.
I heard just last week from a company, as five people retire, they're going to try and replace those five jobs with two people, and try and figure out the rest with AI.Neil Hamilton
Businesses, driven by promises of productivity and threats of competition, have been choosing to use AI tools to overhaul or cut entry-level positions. That’s making an already tight job market even tighter for new graduates, especially in the industries Zarczynski is looking to enter.
In computer science, tools like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex are making it easier than ever to quickly produce code.
And in commercial design, people are using tools like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s Dall-E to create images, for free, based on data scraped from more than half a billion photos and illustrations.
That’s behind a recent report that computer science majors are having a harder time finding work than philosophy majors.
Local ramifications
Local experts are seeing those effects in Central Florida, too.
At an Orange County Commission meeting in June, the Orlando Economic Partnership said job growth in Central Florida fell by about 75% between 2024 and 2025, due to AI and economic uncertainty from tariffs and global conflict. Neil Hamilton is OEP’s senior vice president of research and strategy.
“I'm hearing loud and clear that, particularly with the advent of AI, companies believe they can do more with less,” Hamilton said. “I heard just last week from a company, as five people retire, they're going to try and replace those five jobs with two people, and try and figure out the rest with AI.”
Hard data on AI job displacement in Central Florida is scant, Hamilton says, but the OEP has measured an exponential increase in the number of job postings asking for AI skills. In June, it saw 1,869 job postings seeking AI skills in the Orlando region. That’s double what it was a year ago and almost quadruple what it was two years ago.
For applicants, that’s making for a challenging tension.
“It feels very confusing,” Zarczynski said. “On one end, they want someone who knows the tools, but on the other one, they don't want someone who is over relying on those tools.”
Competence
That tension highlights another thing that’s becoming trickier for employers to screen for: AI is leveling the playing field for competency, making it easier for people without skills to appear competitive.
A 2026 Cengage report on workplace readiness found that 70% of college professors who believed college students are less prepared for the job market than in previous years said overreliance on AI was a factor in their pessimism.
Chloe Becker, who graduated alongside Zarczynski this spring with a digital media degree, has been tutoring students in computer science while she waits for her job to officially begin in a few weeks. She said she’s seen that in some of her clients, as has her younger sister.
“There's lots of kids who just don't know how to do this. They're like, ‘Hey, ask ChatGPT.’” Becker said. “It’s just been bad lately.”
And early data seem to back that up: A 2024 study from Switzerland concluded that increased AI usage was associated with worse critical thinking, and an MIT paper last year found that use of an AI assistant to write essays incurred a “cognitive debt”.
Hiring
Zarczynski, Becker and Juno Le said it’s been especially disheartening to apply for jobs as more and more companies use AI to automate applicant screening and recruitment.
“Quite frankly, it doesn't feel easy knowing that you're doing all of that work, and it's still very likely not a single living human being is going to see what you have put, let's say, hours of work into,” Zarczynski said.
Quite frankly, it doesn't feel easy knowing that you're doing all of that work, and it's still very likely not a single living human being is going to see what you have put, let's say, hours of work into.Anthony Zarczynski
Juno Le is another recent graduate who’s been frustrated by the degree of AI in those applications.
“After doing four internships in college and participating in extracurriculars and getting what I believe was high praise from my editors, my professors, my peers, I am in this hole of struggling to find a job and this endless job search every single day,” Le said in a July 10 interview.
“My conclusion in my head is, ‘OK, am I underqualified for these jobs, or did they just not look at my resume?’” she added.
Some students have tried to cater to the AI tools that are being used to screen applicants. When a classmate mentioned that to Le, her reaction was visceral: “I'm like, this is ridiculous. All of us are going to have the same exact looking resume, and no one is going to stand out. It just feels like I'm like a Twitter bot or something in the grand scheme of things, and I don't really love that.”
Le recently got a job in Tallahassee. It was one of the few she applied for that got sent directly to a human.
As a more extreme case, Zarczynski has had a screening interview conducted entirely through an AI chatbot, typing responses into a text box in real time.
Wage competition
AI isn’t just making it harder to find work at established businesses, Zarczynski says. It’s also making it harder to be an entrepreneur or to do freelance work for some of these entities.
“I've faced people saying, ‘Hey, … why do you charge so much if, you know, I can get a majority of that done with AI so much faster and so much cheaper?’”
Depending on the work, Zarczynski might charge between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. At least one potential customer made an offer that was less than 20% of his rate, citing those AI tools.
What’s to be done?
Candidates have been talking about AI in this midterm election year, but it’s been centered on data centers, especially in the gubernatorial race.
Job displacement, the ultimate cost of living problem, has gone relatively unaddressed in most campaign messaging.
But University of Central Florida political science professor Aubrey Jewett says the issue is becoming harder for politicians to ignore.
“People are really starting to become aware of it, right? Again, it’s not just something that’s, you talk about mythically or in the future. I mean, it's here now and it's happening,” Jewett said. “And I do think that it's fairly bipartisan now — that both Republican and Democratic politicians see this. And they're concerned about it.”
Senate responses
So we asked Florida’s U.S. senate candidates, who if elected, would represent Central Florida, if the government should even have a role in helping people having trouble finding jobs because of the adoption of AI.
The only two Democrats in the race agree that the government has a responsibility to help.
Alex Vindman said he’s a “big believer” in voluntary national public service programs like AmeriCorps, which offer stipends for volunteering on public works projects. He suggested that they could offer temporary relief to graduates in a tight job market.
Jacksonville state Representative Angie Nixon said she also wants to prioritize human workers before AI tools, and is exploring other policies to that effect.
Senator Ashley Moody, the incumbent Republican, did not respond to numerous requests for comment in time for this story. She hasn’t taken a public stance on AI job displacement, but as Florida attorney general and while in Congress she’s pushed to punish the creation of AI “deepfake” videos.
Dr. Neela Taneja Perry was the only Republican who responded to our requests for comment. She said she would support grants to help professionals learn AI tools, and guardrails like parental controls for children.
“I am more worried about the misuse of AI if it's just left alone and left open to anybody who can do anything," said Perry. "The way it is right now, it's like a[n] open game, you know, without any rules. So I think it does need more rules.”
Neil Gillespie, an attorney running as a nonpartisan candidate, declined to comment until after the primary.
Work in progress
For now, the policy playbook is still being written, Jewett says.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think anybody’s got great solutions just yet,” he said.
But there are ideas. Maryland is planning a “year of service” pilot program to bring young people displaced by AI to industries with job shortages like nursing and teaching. It’s being funded with help from OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and General Motors.
A common suggestion, one backed by the OEP, is “retraining:” that people will become more employable if they learn to harness AI tools. Jewett said it echoes the way former president Bill Clinton talked about how the country would adapt to the tech and internet explosion that was nascent in the ‘90s.
Zarczynski said people might be surprised to learn that the job market is tight even though professors have been trying to incorporate it into their course work. Teaching specific tools wouldn’t necessarily be a panacea, he said.
Becker said her professor in the digital studies class allowed students to use AI for their capstone projects, as long as they documented it with screenshots and records of how they prompted it.
And Zarczynski took an AI class called “Low- and No-Code Development” this spring at UCF, but it was hard to keep up with the rate of developments and changes as companies rolled out new products and features.
“Throughout the course, … the capabilities of those tools changed,” he said. “So the entire coursework was changing, basically, from month to month. It was very unprecedented. Students were frustrated.”
Zarczynski suggested that “AI literacy” become a major part of school curricula to help students understand the technology and use it ethically.
He’s hopeful that the widespread adoption of AI doesn’t have to leave humans behind.
“The way the system is working right now is not working. People need to afford things. If they don't have a job, they really can't do that,” he said. “Hopefully it's mostly a matter of time before either someone takes care of the issues within, let's say, the existing system, or the system will break on its own, and someone will have to fix it then.”
In the meantime, he’s still looking for work, 198 applications and counting.
