“Computational Linguistics &/or Language Acquisition (software programs), but essentially it all is a form of A.I.”
You can go to graduate school straight from getting a bachelor’s degree, or you can work for a few years in between. My personal feeling is that you need to be pretty sure that you know what you want to go to graduate school for before you do it. Working makes the most sense if you can find a job that relates to your desired field.
Either going straight to graduate school of finding an appropriate “intended major related” job can be easier to do if you get to know professors as an undergraduate student, and if you get to participate in related research or internships or coop programs. Professors will be writing your recommendations, but might also know of appropriate jobs or know of appropriate schools that you might want to consider for graduate school.
I think that there is a pretty high overlap between the best universities for AI and the best universities for computer science. MIT comes to mind, along with Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, and Washington. I would expect some schools in the UK to be strong, along with some universities in Canada.