A room full of seniors took on AI — and didn't blink

• I went to an AI class for retirees in Singapore.
• I saw them grill the instructor, furiously scribble notes, and marvel at a vibe-coded app.
• "AI is definitely going to stay. Like it or not, we have to engage it," said one participant.

Susanna Lau, 70, squinted at her screen, then laughed.

The AI chatbot she was playing with had just generated a dish she described as "an extravagant Hokkien mee," a Singapore dish of stir-fried noodles in a seafood broth.

Around her, 15 retirees in their 60s and 70s were hunched over laptops, tinkering with AI models and reacting — often out loud — to what they could do.

Asif Saleem, a financial services go-to-market lead for Japan and Asia Pacific at Google, was running the session as a community class in Singapore.

Over four hours, retirees stayed locked in, asking questions, testing prompts, and trying to work out what AI could do for them.

Some came out of fear of being left behind. Others came with doubts. But all were intent on sharpening their skills — proof that learning doesn't stop with age.

Hands up, questions aplenty

The first hour was spent on teaching them the basics: What AI is, what a large language model is, and how multimodal AI works.

Questions came quickly. Retirees interrupted Saleem to ask about AI videos they had seen on social media, whether those clips could be trusted, and what happens to personal data once it's fed into a chatbot.

After fielding their questions, Saleem moved on to teach them prompting. He began with a low-stakes use case: generating images with Google's Gemini.

The retirees were asked to prompt the AI to design a unique fusion dish, drawing on a hobby many of them already loved.

After generating a Chinese-Japanese fusion dish that looked like "Hokkien Mee," Lau learned how to prompt the AI to go further. She asked it to generate a full recipe, suggest possible names ("Umami Forest Lo Mien"), and even recommend additional ingredients she could add to elevate the dish.

I asked if she'd try cooking it at home. She paused, then laughed. "I'll give it some thought."

Another exercise quickly caught on: creating travel postcards.

Retirees prompted the AI to generate images from past trips: a sauna in Japan, a beach in Thailand, and a seaside view in Croatia. They superimposed themselves into the scenes, turning the images into postcards they could send to friends.

Ann Seow, 60, told me she was impressed by AI's "ability to understand language and create its own interpretative work, like a piece of art."

AI opens up "immense possibilities" for what people can do in retirement, such as discovering new hobbies, learning new skills, or even starting a business, she added.

Using AI to supercharge work

Next, the class was introduced to NotebookLM, Google's research and note-taking tool.

At first, I was skeptical about introducing this tool to retirees. NotebookLM is typically pitched as a productivity tool for students, researchers, and office workers.

Saleem quickly showed why that assumption didn't hold. He taught them how to upload a report to NotebookLM and transform it into a summary — not just text, but also audio, visuals, mind maps, and even presentation slides.

For older people in the room, the appeal was immediate. Instead of straining their eyes over a hundred-page document, they could listen to a spoken summary or grasp key ideas through a visual map.

"How can we know the information is accurate?" one participant asked.

It was a familiar concern. AI systems can hallucinate and sometimes produce inaccurate answers. Saleem acknowledged the risk but pointed out a key difference with NotebookLM: It draws only from the sources the user uploads, rather than the open internet.

Seow was visibly impressed. "That would have saved me so much time when I was working on PowerPoint slides," she said.

"Work that we used to do manually and take days, now it is done speedily in split seconds for us," said another retiree, Cindy Ang.

"Looks like there are more plus points to use AI. I was wondering, why do I have to fear AI?" Ang added.

Engaging AI — on their own terms

For the final segment of the class, the seniors were meant to try vibe coding a simple web app themselves. Time ran out.

Saleem gave a quick demo of how easily one could vibe-code an app using Google AI Studio. In minutes, he built a Lunar New Year app that identified one's zodiac sign and explained it.

The retirees watched closely. When the app worked, the room broke into excited chatter.

After class, Ang told me she had initially arrived with "some mixed feelings."

She wanted to master AI skills because she feared she might "become irrelevant." At the same time, she was wary. "What if AI is out of control?" she said.

By the end of the workshop, she's convinced that older people "have to engage AI rather than reject it."

"AI is definitely going to stay. Like it or not, we have to engage it," she said.

"However, it is important not to be totally reliant on AI, that we forget we have a human brain to use," she added.

While Seow said she found learning AI useful, she worries the AI era is widening what she calls an "information gap."

"Seniors did not grow up with smartphones or tablets or digital services, so we may be slower to understand tech concepts," she explained.

Throughout the session, many furiously scribbled notes as Saleem spoke. They also peppered him with probing questions, rarely accepting explanations at face value.

When I later asked Ang if she might write to me about her reflections, she quipped: "What if I use AI to help me?"