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 the 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, has spent the past sixteen weeks co-teaching an artificial intelligence course at Arizona State University called “The Agentic Self.”
The course, which wrapped in late April, split students between his Los Angeles office and ASU’s main campus in Tempe. They learned to create synthetic voice prompts, build personalised 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.
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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 course
“The Agentic Self” is housed in ASU’s GAME School, and will.i.am holds the title of Professor of Practice. The 75 students ranged in age from 18 to 70. Over sixteen class meetings, they progressed from basic prompt engineering to building functioning AI agents tailored to specific use cases.
The student projects were more practical than academic. Claudia Beaton built Aki, an app for street and beach vendors in Brazil that uses AI to help them improve their businesses. She had been developing the app before the course but said the AI component came from what she learned in class. Other students created agents to help military veterans navigate their benefits and tools for learning African languages.
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. The students are not learning to build enterprise middleware. They are learning to instruct AI systems to perform tasks that matter to the communities they come from.
The entrepreneur
will.i.am’s technology career predates the current AI wave by more than a decade. He was appointed Intel’s Director of Creative Innovation in 2011. He founded i.am+, a consumer technology company, in 2013. The company acquired smart home startup Wink and sensor company Sensiya, and launched the Puls smartwatch in 2014 and the XUPERMASK smart face mask with Honeywell in 2021.
The track record is mixed. The Puls smartwatch was widely panned and quietly discontinued. The XUPERMASK, a 299 dollar device with HEPA filtration, noise-cancelling audio, and LED lights, arrived late in the pandemic and did not achieve commercial scale. i.am+ pivoted multiple times before the current AI focus.
FYI.AI, the company will.i.am now leads, launched in 2023 as an AI-powered creative collaboration tool. It has since expanded into RAiDiO.FYI, an interactive AI radio platform, and EDU.FYI, the education-focused arm built in partnership with ASU. He has reportedly invested in OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Runway, and completed Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program in 2024.
Venture capital firms are raising billions on the back of returns from AI companies like Anthropic, and will.i.am’s portfolio of AI investments positions him as both a practitioner and a financial beneficiary of the technology he is teaching students to use. The dual role is worth noting. He is not a disinterested educator. He is a stakeholder in the ecosystem he is evangelising.
The context
Meta cut 8,000 jobs in May alone as part of an AI-driven restructuring that the company described as a shift toward technical roles and automated workflows. Across the industry, 73,000 positions were eliminated at 95 companies in the first four months of the year. The pattern is consistent: companies are investing in AI capabilities while reducing headcount, describing the layoffs as a reallocation toward AI-native skills rather than a net reduction in opportunity.
will.i.am’s argument, delivered at the Milken Institute Global Conference on 5 May, is that AI will create new opportunities for people in underserved communities rather than threaten them. “That is the world we’re trying to build, trying to empower those who have been ignored and invisible,” he said.
The argument is not unique to will.i.am. It is the standard refrain of every technology executive who has ever presided over a displacement cycle. What is different is the audience. The students in “The Agentic Self” are not Stanford computer science graduates or Silicon Valley product managers. They are college students at a public university, some attending from a recording studio in Los Angeles, learning to build AI tools for veterans and street vendors.
Microsoft’s own terms of service describe its Copilot AI as suitable for “entertainment only”, a disclaimer that underscores the gap between the industry’s rhetoric about AI transformation and the actual reliability of its consumer products. The distance between what AI companies promise and what their tools deliver is the space in which courses like “The Agentic Self” operate: teaching people to use technology that is powerful enough to be useful but not yet reliable enough to be trusted without human judgment.
The question
will.i.am is in discussions with the Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California to expand the curriculum. The ambition is to turn EDU.FYI into a platform that brings AI education to institutions that do not have the resources to build their own programmes.
OpenAI lost its product chief, its Sora head, and its enterprise CTO in a single day earlier this year, a reminder that even the companies building the most advanced AI systems cannot retain the people who run them. The instability at the top of the AI industry contrasts with the stability of the problem at the bottom: millions of people who need practical skills to navigate a labour market that is being restructured around technology they did not build and do not yet understand.
Seventy-five students is not a workforce programme. It is a proof of concept. The question is whether a musician teaching AI in a recording studio can scale what universities and technology companies have so far failed to deliver: AI education that reaches the people who need it most rather than the people who already have it.
will.i.am’s previous technology ventures suggest that the execution may not match the vision. His previous products were ambitious, intermittently functional, and short-lived. But “The Agentic Self” is not a gadget. It is a curriculum. And the student who built an AI-powered app for Brazilian street vendors is a harder outcome to dismiss than a 299 dollar smart mask. The question, as with everything will.i.am builds, is whether the second semester will be as compelling as the first.
