will.i.am Taught 75 College Students to Build AI Agents While the Tech Industry Fired 73,000 People
May 8, 2026 - 1:40 pm
Image by: Xuthoria
The tech industry laid off more than 73,000 workers in the first four months of 2026. In a classroom inside a Hollywood recording studio, a 51-year-old hip-hop artist was teaching 75 college students how to build AI agents that are replacing them.
will.i.am, born William Adams, co-founder of the Black Eyed Peas and founder of the AI company FYI.AI, co-taught an artificial intelligence course at Arizona State University called “The Agentic Self” for sixteen weeks.
The Course
The course split students between will.i.am's Los Angeles office and ASU’s main campus in Tempe. They learned to create synthetic voice prompts, build personalized AI agents, and apply agentic AI concepts to real problems. Guest lecturers included Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, and Richard Kerris, Nvidia’s general manager for media and entertainment.
The premise of the course is that young people, particularly those from underserved communities, should not wait for AI to happen to them. They should learn to build it.
"There’s a generation of folks who are like, why do I need to go to school? I just got debt and a diploma with no jobs," will.i.am said. “We are on a mission to change that narrative."
The Students
The 75 students ranged in age from 18 to 70. Their projects were more practical than academic, addressing issues like:
- Helping street and beach vendors in Brazil improve their businesses using AI (Claudia Beaton's Aki app).
- Assisting military veterans navigate benefits and tools for learning African languages.
The Agentic Era
The course name is deliberate. The tech industry has entered what Google, at its Cloud Next conference, branded the "agentic era", a phase in which AI systems act autonomously on behalf of users rather than simply responding to queries.
Google rebranded its Vertex AI platform as the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Salesforce, Microsoft, and every major enterprise software company have launched agent-building tools. The concept of an AI agent has moved from research abstraction to corporate marketing pitch in under two years.
What will.i.am is doing is teaching non-engineers to participate in that shift rather than be displaced by it.