JetBlue CEO’s Commencement Lesson: Why Character Counts More In The Age Of AI

JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty gave the commencement address at the Fordham Preparatory School, where her son was finishing high school. I loved the speech. It was funny in parts, and I actually cried thinking about some of her messaging as a parent. I especially liked that it wasn’t nearly as grandiose as some of these efforts try to be.

I think I disagreed with a good bit, but her broader message not to confuse achievement with character is spot on.

The world needs greatness. More greatness is better. But it mostly needs people to make things better in small, steady, and human ways. She offers that it’s important to stay curious, build a reputation through quiet acts, learn AI but do not mistake it for love or wisdom, put the phone down, trust your gut, and preserve your friendships.

Geraghty’s talk is funny, parent-centered and built around reputation, and human connection. She says you should fix what’s broken, make the room better, and keep others warm.

Here’s where I think she’s off. She cleverly contrasts AI with “mother intelligence” arguing that the most important intelligence is the long-running, intimate, loving knowledge of parents and family.

• Servers store vastly more raw data than parents. Parent intelligence isn’t better because of how much they know about it, it’s superior because of context, sacrifice, memory, attachment, and the moral stake they have in your life. Parents remember your life as part of their own, they have paid costs for you. Being known by people who have loved you through your worst moments is different than being processed as data.

• She says that AI can generate answers but ‘it cannot generate wonder’ but that begs the questoin about what wonder means? Because I do think there’s tremendous awe in the capabilities we’ve already seen for asking surprising and curiosity-producing questions, and for making connections that humans haven’t before. And I think there’s awe and wonder at the potential it has for creating abundance and transcending the historical problems of scarcity.

• Similarly, the idea that “no model and no algorithm will ever” make certain judgment calls is probably wrong. Making human value depend on claims about what AI “cannot” do will age badly.

  She’s a CEO today but I’d be surprised if we don’t have an AI CEO soon enough. Surely AI could have done better than her predecessor. Remember that JetBlue is mired in $9 billion worth of debt, hasn’t made money since 2019, and is struggling to redefine itself.

  Current frontier systems already have incredible reasoning. It’s only getting better. Maybe AI will not come close to the top performing CEOs for some time, or wouldn’t decide things in uniquely human ways that we still care about. The better distinction is that AIs aren’t close to embodying love, mortality, or loyalty.

• Her admonition to “trust your gut” is probably overplayed. There can be tacit knowledge and received wisdom that’s difficult to articulate, but passed down through culture, which gets embedded in ‘gut feelings’. That can be valuable, and we may want a bias towards listening to it until we’re sure we understand where it comes from and why it’s wrong. But it can also embody bias, fear, tribalism, and status anxiety. So listen to your gut, unpack it, and consider it as part of your decision-making framework.

Nonetheless, she makes an important point about reputation being built from the way you treat front desk staff, cleaning staff, weaker teammates, and people with no immediate usefulness. The most important thing she offers may be that character matters more than achievement. And I think there’s two reasons why this is true.

1. Talented people with bad values will destroy you. If you have to have people with bad values, you want them to be incompetent! You don’t want an evil genius.

2. AI makes character far more important. As capability becomes abundant and no longer a binding constraint, trust becomes the scarce resource. Who can get others to go all-in with them? Whom do they trust?

I’m glad to see her tell graduating students to learn AI rather than rebelling against it. In some ways it’s surprising to see some of the most negative views of new technology coming from younger generations, but they’re also facing great uncertainties – the simple path to the upper middle class that flows from a college degree and a consulting career or law school is becoming far less secure.

AI will benefit the least well off, because they won’t need to know all the culture cues or how to write a proper email. AI can do that for them. And it will benefit the most productive people, who will be leveraged tremendously. We’ll see unicorn companies with just a handful of employees. But it’s that upper middle class that seems most at risk, and they’re overrepresented by the people at commencements.

Yet she treats AI mainly as a tool that can analyze, predict, and optimize while the human world remains largely unaltered. That seems to understate what’s likely in front of us. Maybe it’s how she’ll experience the world. She’s basically my age, and she’s an airline CEO.

In the future AI is clearly becoming the way people will interface with the world from education to work to management of home life, and we’ll rely on it in decision-making. AI does not need to ‘love’ and be human to become a tutor, counselor, coach and even mimic a friend.

What’s really changing is that many of the things that once signaled excellence will become cheap – fluency, polished prose, analysis, coding, and powerpoint decks will be increasingly automated. The scarce goods become taste, courage, trustworthiness, and the ability to decide what is worth doing when machines can do almost anything.

The tools of the future are incredibly powerful, and wil become only more so. They can already answer questions, write code, translate languages, summarize books, generate images, and help you fast. But acceleration isn’t direction. You’re the one that needs to decide where you want to use those tools to go.

Do it with integrity in all the small things from how you answer email, how you treat someone with less power, how you speak instead of gossip, and how you act when nobody will punish you or reward you.

The people who knew you before you were impressive matter most. Stay close to them, protect the relationships that make you more honest, and maybe call your parents sometimes.