Leading with Purpose: Social Change for the AI Age
Introduction: A Moment Like No Other
Good afternoon, 2025 Kean honors students, faculty, parents and distinguished guests. First, congratulations to all of you who are about to graduate. You've worked incredibly hard, you have excelled, and you deserve every recognition for your accomplishments.
I know I’m the last thing between you and cake; but I want to take a few minutes to reflect on the moment of extraordinary opportunity yet anxiety you are facing.
Let's start with a quick poll about what you think has been the most important event in your lifetimes. Not just what made headlines, but what will truly shape the trajectory of your future.
Remember, purpose is the magnet that pulls perseverance through exhaustion.
- Raise your hand if you think COVID and the death of millions was the most formative event of your lifetime.
- How about the election and re-election of President Trump?
- What about the development of smartphones and social media?
I would argue that when you look back decades from now, you'll recognize the development of generative AI as the single most transformative event of your lifetimes.
I would argue that when you look back decades from now, you'll recognize the development of generative AI as the single most transformative event of your lifetimes. Within five days of its launch, ChatGPT reached one million users. Within two months, it had 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Now it's in every device we use.
Why? Because I believe that these tools that have mastered the use of language are the key to unlocking solutions to our hardest problems.
But the story of this technology is as yet unwritten. We may use it to write first drafts of poems and recipes and, dare I say it, term papers and other things that may make someone a lot of money.
Ever a trenchant observer of the obvious, Jerry Seinfeld remarked at his 2024 Duke commencement address that "we're smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and still so stupid we can't figure out if we did the right thing." Right now, we are mostly doing it wrong. That is to say, we aren’t taking full enough advantage. And I'm here to say your class can do it right.
In this era of extraordinary challenge, we need to do better, and you are the generation who will decide whether we use these tools to tackle climate change, address Alzheimer's, reduce inequality, and strengthen our democracy—or whether we let these powerful tools for enhancing our intelligence instead amplify our worst tendencies.
The World You're Graduating Into: Confronting Reality
Let's be honest about the America you're graduating into. It's a nation where life expectancy is declining for the first time in generations. Where children will earn less than their parents. Where political divisions have hardened into tribal identities. Where trust in institutions—from government to media to higher education—continues to erode as institutions fail to respond to the challenges of our time. Where the effects of climate change grow more visible each season.
We're witnessing something even more troubling: the collapse of dignity, decency, and due process. The erosion of the rule of law. When powerful institutions discard these foundational principles, democracy itself is at risk.
We're witnessing something even more troubling: the collapse of dignity, decency, and due process. The erosion of the rule of law. When powerful institutions discard these foundational principles, democracy itself is at risk.
As you prepare to leave Kean and enter a world that sometimes seems consumed by malice and madness, you might be asking: where do I find hope?
I don't share these realities to discourage you, but to use these challenges to encourage you to embrace your power to make change. You have something previous generations did not.
AI as the Great Amplifier
You have access to the most powerful cognitive tools humanity has ever created. And you don't need a Kean PhD in computer science to use them.
When I founded my first public interest technology company decades ago, I had to spend over a million dollars on programmers to create basic features. Today, you can simply tell AI what you want, and it will write the code for you. The barrier to entry isn't technical expertise anymore—it's having a clear problem to solve and the determination to solve it.
Much of our public conversation about AI focuses on risks, and they're real. But I'm here to warn you about one very specific risk—the failure to use AI to solve problems that matter and to recognize your own role in doing so.
Think of AI as having three superpowers you can harness:
First, Insights. AI synthesizes information. The World Bank found that nearly a third of its reports had never been downloaded—not even once. Two million research papers are published yearly, most unread by anyone except the author and her mother. What if solutions to our biggest problems are buried in PDFs nobody reads? AI can mine them. That’s what it’s doing when it sifts through research to find cures to orphan diseases.
Second, Access. AI talks with you. Not just answering questions, but collaborating on ideas. At Proctor & Gamble, researchers found that teams working with AI produced more balanced solutions, breaking down silos between technical and business thinking.
Third, Action. These systems don't just process information—they can accomplish goals by breaking them into steps and executing them. They adapt to feedback and coordinate with other systems to solve complex problems. We used AI agents in NJ to conduct in-depth research to help run our AI task force.
These aren't future possibilities—they exist today.
The question isn't whether AI will transform society—it's whether you'll use it to build the society you want to live in.
History offers us a sobering parallel: When the automobile emerged, we faced not a binary choice between horse-drawn carriages and private cars, but a spectrum of possibilities. Had we prioritized robust public transportation networks, we might have reaped the rewards of mobility without unleashing toxic air, deadly highways, atomized communities, and the hollowing of America's economic core. Today's unwalkable landscapes force us into digital isolation as surely as they trap us in climate-destroying metal boxes.
The AI revolution presents us with a similar crossroads—how do we embrace innovation without blindly careening over the cliff of acceleration? You stand at this threshold of transformation with both extraordinary challenges and extraordinary opportunities.
The Call for Public Entrepreneurs
So what does all this mean for you? It means you have a choice.
The world doesn't just need entrepreneurs who seek to enrich themselves—it needs public entrepreneurs who seek to enrich the lives of others. I'm not asking you to sacrifice your ambitions. I'm asking you to expand them.
As Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us: "Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'"
Here are my Four P's for how you can become agents of change - public entrepreneurs—direct advice I wish someone had given me at your age:
First, Purpose: Pick a problem you care about and commit to solving it. Not a vague issue like "climate change" or "inequality," but something specific and actionable that matters enough to you that you want to get out of bed every day to work on it. Find meaningful challenges that align with your values. And don't rule out government work—especially state and local government, where policies actually touch real people's lives. Remember, purpose is the magnet that pulls perseverance through exhaustion.
Second, Partnership: Partnership is what transforms mere ideas into actions. Find your people. Collaborate with others who share your passion. As Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
No complex problem will be solved by someone working alone. The myth of the entrepreneur—Zuck, Elon, Bezos—was so yesterday, and the lone genius idea has always been a myth. It takes a community to make change happen. You need diverse perspectives and complementary skills. Real change happens in groups.
No complex problem will be solved by someone working alone. The myth of the entrepreneur—Zuck, Elon, Bezos—was so yesterday, and the lone genius idea has always been a myth. It takes a community to make change happen. You need diverse perspectives and complementary skills. Real change happens in groups.
Third, Pinpoint the Problem: Take the time to truly understand the problem before jumping to solutions. A real innovator doesn't just accept problems as presented—they dive deep to understand the real root causes so they can figure out the right levers of change to pull.
Fourth, Participation: Design solutions WITH communities, not FOR them. True problem-solving demands solutions that are legitimate as well as effective. This means treating the people you're trying to help as active participants with valuable knowledge, not passive recipients of your brilliant ideas. So whether you are making your school, your workplace, your town or your country better, LISTEN.
Here in New Jersey, we’re already proving what happens when purpose meets technology.
• My Career NJ uses a large-language model trained on real-time labor-market data to give every resident a personalized, plain-English career roadmap
• We’re taking the same AI muscle inside government. Thousands of official notices—from unemployment letters to child-support reminders—are now rewritten by AI into 6th-grade-level plain language. Response rates have jumped by double digits, which means fewer missed benefits and fewer costly appeals.
• And in our busiest call centers—the Motor Vehicle Commission and Division of Taxation—AI copilots whisper answers to human agents in real time, cutting average wait times from 22 minutes to under 8 and slicing call-handling errors in half.
Three projects, one lesson: when we pair powerful tools with public-interest goals, bureaucracy becomes a bridge, not a barrier.
These examples show what's possible when technology is guided by purpose, partnership, impactful problems, and participation.
Living a Life of Purpose
As you leave Kean and start making your own decisions about what kind of life to lead, let me share something personal.
I've had a varied career—attorney, tech entrepreneur, White House official, state innovation officer, and professor. I've worked for four different governments. Throughout it all, I've been guided by a simple principle: find work that matters to you and matters to others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
This doesn't mean sacrificing financial security or ambition. It means aligning your talents with something larger than yourself. The deepest satisfaction doesn't come from what you have, but from who you become through the work you do.
Sometimes the most meaningful careers don't follow a straight line. They evolve. They surprise you. The work that will most fulfill you might not even exist yet—in the age of AI, new jobs are emerging and you might have to create them.
I know many of you are worried about the future. You're worried about finding a good job, paying off loans, making your mark in an uncertain world. Those worries are valid. But don't let them narrow your vision of what's possible.
YOU have more power to shape the future than any generation before you. You have the education and the technology to solve problems in ways previous generations couldn't imagine. If you can marry your advantages to a commitment to live a life of purpose, you will do well and do good.
When faced with choices about your career and life, ask yourself three questions: "Will this work make me better? Will it make others better? Will it make our institutions better?" If you can answer yes to all three, you're on the right track.
Conclusion: Your Revolutionary Moment
Let me end by sharing something about the place where you've spent these formative years.
Just a short walk from here, Liberty Hall still stands—a building with a remarkable story. During the Revolutionary War, William Livingston, who would become New Jersey's first elected governor, took refuge there when British forces were hunting for him. The home that would later belong to the Kean family had secret hiding places and escape routes.
That same revolutionary spirit lives on in this university. When John Kean served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and later as the first cashier of the Bank of the United States, he couldn't have imagined that his family name would one day grace an institution preparing students for their own revolutions.
In the 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt visited this campus—then Newark State Teachers College—to observe its innovative teaching methods. She recognized that preparing young people to solve problems in new ways was essential to democracy itself.
You are graduating at a revolutionary moment. Like the revolutionaries who walked these grounds, you face uncertainty and difficulty. But you also have unprecedented opportunities to make an impact.
So here's my final advice:
- Do stuff that matters.
- Do it with people who are passionate.
- Take the time to define the problem.
And never underestimate the impact you can have in the world when you use the power of technology and community together.
The future isn't just in Washington or Silicon Valley. It's in your hands—the hands of graduates who understand that the most powerful technology we've ever seen can be used not just to enrich yourselves, but to enrich the lives of others.
May you go forward with wisdom, courage, and compassion. And may you look back years from now and know that you didn't just witness a revolution—you helped lead it.
Thank you.