colleges teaching – Rob Hillard, CEO of Deloitte’s Asia-Pacific branch, says many colleges are failing students for an AI-shaped workplace by teaching the technology as “cheating.” He points to survey data showing widespread discouragement—and rising everyday usage—of AI among st
For many graduates walking into their first jobs, the lesson they carry isn’t just about how AI works—it’s about what it supposedly means.
Rob Hillard, CEO of Deloitte’s Asia-Pacific branch, says that after college, many new entrants see AI through a single, negative lens: cheating.
Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg this week. Hillard said recent graduates were arriving with what he described as a “negative perception” of AI because they were taught in college that it is used for cheating. “Too many are seeing the technology as cheating,” he said. “We have to change that.”.
Hillard’s message goes beyond student behavior. He argues that universities have been slow to make AI a central part of how students prepare for the workplace—and that correcting this perception is essential for evolving how work is done as AI continues to develop.
“The only way to invent and design the work of the future is by working hands-on with the technology, with seeing how you can get the most effective interface between people and machine,” Hillard said.
The gap he describes isn’t theoretical. A recent survey from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation of around 3. 800 students found that 42% of respondents said their school discourages the use of AI. and 11% said the technology is prohibited altogether. Yet even with those restrictions in place. more than half of US college students—57%—said they use AI in their coursework at least weekly. and one in five said they use it daily.
The tension is also spilling into graduation culture. In recent weeks, AI use at colleges has come into sharper focus after several graduation speakers were booed by students when mentioning the tech’s growing role in the world.
That friction lands in a labor market that is already changing. Anxiety around AI-driven job displacement is particularly acute in the professional services industry, where firms are moving quickly to embed generative and agentic AI into their workflows.
Deloitte. along with other top firms. is using the new technology to expedite repetitive. data-heavy tasks that were previously left to junior workers. That shift is pushing new questions about whether firms’ own education and training strategies are keeping pace for the next generation entering these workplaces.
Hiring for certain job roles, including management consultants, is down. Deloitte’s fellow Big Four firm PwC has cut all entry-level recruitment in the US by a third over the next three years—an action described as driven, in part, by “the impact of AI,” a Business Insider report said in August.
Against that backdrop, Hillard told Bloomberg that Deloitte is responding by taking on “record numbers of graduates” and investing more than ever in training those graduates for work of the future.
Deloitte Rob Hillard Asia-Pacific AI cheating perception generative AI agentic AI higher education Gallup Lumina Foundation student survey PwC entry-level hiring management consultants workforce training future of work