Ronn Torossian, Founder & Chairman, 5W
A new 99-point gap in American AI sentiment is going to sort your communications and marketing workforce faster than any technology in 20 years. The UCF commencement video tells you exactly what to screen for — and exactly what to screen out.
I have hired thousands of public relations and marketing professionals across two decades. I watched the UCF commencement video three times this weekend. Every chief executive, chief marketing officer, and chief communications officer hiring this summer should watch it once. (404 Media, Inc..)
The tape is a hiring memo. Treat it as such.
Gloria Caulfield — vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Development Company and a respected Florida business executive — told the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media graduating class that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” The graduates booed her. One yelled “AI sucks!” Caulfield paused, smiled, called the response “passion,” and finished her speech.
She was right about AI. And she conducted herself, under live ambush, the way every senior communications executive in your company should aspire to. Hire Caulfield-types. Don’t hire booers.
Here is the data that makes this concrete.
5W’s just-completed AI Power User Study — the largest behavioral survey of American AI sentiment we have ever fielded — identified a measurable split that should reshape every comms, marketing, and creative hire your company makes this year. Americans who use AI daily score +57 favorable on the technology. Americans who use it rarely or never score −42. A 99-point gap. It is the widest behavioral divide in American public opinion right now — wider than partisanship, race, gender, or age. Frequency of AI use predicts AI sentiment three times more strongly than any traditional demographic.
What that gap means for your business is precise. The −42 cohort will not, under any circumstance, build your brand authority inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — the platforms where your customers now research, decide, and convert. They cannot. The hostility prevents the fluency. The booers on the UCF tape will arrive in your inbox this summer with resumes claiming digital-native skill sets. The video tells you what their resumes will not.
Three things to do before your next hire.
One — add an AI fluency screen to every communications, content, and marketing interview. A working version: “Show me a brand you think is winning inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity right now. Walk me through the strategy.” If the candidate cannot answer with specificity, they cannot do the job. It does not matter how clean their writing samples are. Citation share is the new market share. A candidate who cannot operate inside the AI engines cannot grow it.
Two — interview for composure. Watch Caulfield on the tape again. Ambushed. On camera. In front of thousands. She did not flinch. She did not apologize. She used a single sentence — “passion” — to defuse the moment and reclaim the stage. That is exactly the talent your CCO will need the next time your company faces a crisis cycle, and that is exactly the talent the booers on the same tape did not display. Ask candidates: “Tell me about a moment you took public criticism and kept performing.” The hesitations are the tell.
Three — re-evaluate your campus recruiting list. I am not telling you to stop hiring from UCF. I am telling you to weight by behavior, not pedigree. Some Nicholson graduates are exceptional. The video tells you they are not the loudest cohort. The pipeline still produces talent, but the median is sliding. Audit your campus-by-campus hiring data against first-year retention and AI-skill ramp time. The institutions that have integrated AI into communications coursework — Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Northwestern’s Medill, Newhouse, Annenberg — are producing demonstrably different graduates than the ones whose programs still treat AI as a debate topic. Price the difference.
I have built 5W into the AI Communications Firm — a top US public relations agency by O’Dwyer’s, Agency of the Year in the American Business Awards, a 2026 Top Place to Work in Communications by Ragan. We hire from every major communications program in the country. The 99-point gap is the most important number in our recruiting pipeline. It will be the most important number in yours.
Gloria Caulfield told the UCF class of 2026 the truth. They booed her. The labor market is going to settle the disagreement very quickly.
Hire the ones who would have clapped.
Author Bio:
Ronn Torossian is founder & chairman of 5W, the AI Communications Firm.
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