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Over the past few years, artificial intelligence has started to infiltrate basically every industry on the planet. That includes the business of higher education, but one college in Arizona learned about the potential pitfalls the hard way after turning to A.I. to announce the names of students who’d earned a degree at its graduation ceremony.
There is little doubt that artificial intelligence is here to stay in some form after taking the world by storm, and even its biggest critics have to acknowledge it has the potential to streamline many facets of modern existence and bring some positive change into the world.
With that said, it is impossible to ignore the shortcomings and occasionally alarming flaws of a form of technology that’s still very much in its infancy, and evangelists have not done themselves any favors in their quest to win over skeptics by attempting to push it onto the masses in spite of a slew of well-documented weaknesses.
Many companies and organizations have adopted mandates to adopt A.I. primarily for the sake of doing so as opposed to focusing on applications where potential downsides are minimized. That can lead to some very awkward situations when what should have been an experiment is rolled out for something that actually matters, which was the case with a graduation ceremony that unfolded last week.
Glendale Community College in Arizona regretted its decision to rely on A.I. to read off names at graduation
Earning a college degree is the culmination of years of hard work and (typically) a sizable amount of money and debt, and getting to cross the stage and receive your diploma is a fairly monumental and once-in-a-lifetime moment for most people.
The institutions that hand them out tend to make sure the ceremonies where they’re presented go off without a hitch, which typically includes recruiting a speaker who is provided with a list of names and the correct pronunciations to ensure every student gets a brief moment to shine.
However, according to 12News, Glendale Community College decided to go a different route this year, as it turned to an A.I. system to read the names of the students who donned a cap and gown for the pomp and circumstance that unfolded on its campus in Arizona on May 15th.
Unfortunately, things went awry, as the system in question malfunctioned while mispronouncing some names, skipping others, and repeatedly freezing while causing plenty of confusion among graduates and the friends and family members who’d assembled to cheer them on.
College president Tiffany Hernandez was greeted with plenty of boos when she revealed A.I. was to blame for the snafu, and there was some additional heckling when she announced the students who’d already walked would not get a second chance to cross the stage and have their names read properly.
College graduates were pissed after their school used AI to announce graduates’ names and missed hundreds of names pic.twitter.com/dwz6xFIWiv
— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) May 18, 2026
There are a number of companies, including Tassel and NameCheck, that offer an A.I. “solution” for schools looking to remove that particular human element from graduations, but it’s unclear which one was harnessed at Glendale Community College.
The school eventually reversed course by having a human read the names of the alumni who were impacted, and it issued a statement after the fact, saying:
During one of our commencement ceremonies, there was a technical issue that impacted the reading of some graduate names.
While the issue was corrected during the ceremony, we are sorry for the disruption it caused during what should have been a celebratory moment for our graduates and their families. We have also communicated directly with graduates to apologize for the experience.
We are incredibly proud of all our graduates and are taking steps to ensure an issue like this does not occur again.
That transpired a week after a real estate executive who was tapped to deliver a commencement speech at the University of Central Florida was roundly booed for saying, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” which stemmed from her failure to read a room of students who primarily majored in the humanities.