Naga City Mayor Leni Robredo told this year’s Bicol University graduates that the qualities hardest for technology to replicate — empathy, sound judgment, and a sense of duty to others — will matter most in the working world they are about to enter.
She delivered the message on Monday, June 15, before the university’s 56th Commencement Exercises, framing much of her address around the disruption that artificial intelligence is expected to bring to employment. Robredo pointed to research suggesting that millions of workers worldwide could see their roles upended by automation and emerging tools.
Her response to that anxiety was not to dismiss it but to reframe it. Continuous learning and the willingness to acquire new skills will be essential, she said, yet the labor market will increasingly reward capacities that machines cannot easily copy — among them resilience, leadership, the ability to analyze problems, and creativity.
“It turns out, softness can be a competitive edge,” Robredo said, adding that empathy ranks among the abilities employers are now seeking at the fastest-growing rate.
The mayor tied this argument to her own administration’s work in Naga. She described tools the city has rolled out that use AI to prepare for disasters, systems that let residents track public spending as it happens, and digitized government services. Technology, she argued, becomes a public good only when ethical limits guide how it is built and used.
That principle, she said, traces back to the governance approach of her late husband, former Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo, whose name the university’s own institute of governance carries. She urged that new tools be deployed to widen transparency, sharpen accountability, and draw citizens into decision-making — never to substitute for human conscience.
Robredo also pressed the graduates to weigh their futures by a measure broader than personal success. Rising in life, she said, carries an obligation to lift others along the way.
“As scholars of the people, you are simply asked to carry them with you as you rise,” she said.
She invoked the Bicolano ideal of being “Oragon” — a regional byword for grit and the nerve to stand by what is right even when it is difficult.
Robredo recounted counsel her husband once gave their eldest daughter about endurance and the long view, telling the graduates that hardship frequently turns into the foundation for what comes next.
“Be patient, be brave, always strive to be excellent, but most of all, strive to be human,” Robredo said.
