When people see my résumé they assume I'm a tech person. I built adoption.com in 1995 — yes, that one. I taught internet development at a community college in the 1990s, back when "internet development" meant teaching adults how to open a web browser. So on paper, AI is my lane.

It isn't, actually. I'd been mostly away from tech for a long time. I raised seven kids I'd adopted. I ran orphanages in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Haiti. I sold houses in Ajijic, the small Mexican town where I kept my second home. When I turned 54, the last thing I thought I'd be doing in my next chapter was learning a whole new software toolkit.

Then my aunt died.

She was dear to me, and Alzheimer's had been slowly taking her for years before it finally finished the job. When I found out she'd left me money, the first thing I thought was that it was her money — and that whatever I did with it, it should go toward something she would have been proud of.

What I decided was this: I was going to rescue street dogs.

If you've spent time in Mexico, you know the street dog situation. It is a particular kind of daily heartbreak, and I had a particular kind of stubborn that makes me the wrong person to ignore it. So I used the inheritance to start a rescue. I named it Bone Voyage. I built a website. I hired a small team of remote virtual assistants — most of them in the Philippines — to help me run the operations.

Then I discovered AI could write.

I want to say up front: I did not plan this. I was not reading about "the AI revolution." I was trying to make my rescue's website rank on Google for things like "adopt a dog in Mexico," because the more people who found us, the more dogs we could place. I knew enough SEO from twenty years earlier to know that search engines reward a lot of good, focused content. I also knew there was no way on earth I could personally write 300 original articles about street dogs, dog adoption, dog care, and Mexican veterinary logistics.

So one afternoon I asked ChatGPT — which I'd downloaded mostly out of curiosity — to help me draft an article about dog vaccinations in Mexico.

The draft took ninety seconds.

It wasn't perfect. It needed an edit. But the bones were there — the structure, the questions, the tone — and I realized, sitting at my kitchen table with a dog asleep on my feet, that I had just cut my content operation by somewhere between 70% and 90%.

I hired more VAs. I trained them to use AI as their first-draft tool and themselves as the editors. We built 300+ articles over a year. Our backlinks grew. Our traffic grew. We placed more dogs.

I ran through the inheritance eventually, and that's its own story. But here's the part I want to share with you, the reader who landed on this newsletter because somewhere inside, you're asking yourself: am I too old to learn this?

You are not.

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Here is what I noticed in those first months using AI, as a 54-year-old woman who had last touched production code in the mid-90s:

It's not a tech skill. It's a collaboration skill.

Using AI well is closer to managing a bright-but-green intern than it is to programming. I was already good at managing people — I'd been raising seven kids and running three orphanages. It turns out that "know what you want, say it clearly, review the work, give feedback, try again" is a skill AI rewards. If you've ever been a parent, a teacher, a manager, a nurse, or a boss of any kind — you already have the hard part.

The tools want you to succeed.

Every month the interfaces got kinder, the errors got more forgiving, the models got smarter about knowing what I actually meant. This is the opposite of the 1990s, when the computer was openly hostile and the learning curve was vertical. If you tried to use a computer in 1995 and decided it wasn't for you — please understand, that was a different computer. This one is a different kind of thing.

Your life experience is the unfair advantage.

Most younger AI users I watch are better at prompting faster but worse at knowing whether the output is any good. Fifty years of living on this planet teach you things that matter enormously when AI produces something and you have to decide whether it's useful, true, appropriate, cruel, or wrong. I am a better user of AI at 57 than I would have been at 27. So are you.

The time you save is real.

That article on dog vaccinations that took ninety seconds would have taken me two hours. Multiply that by 300 articles and you start understanding what AI actually is for people like us: it's three additional workdays per week, for the rest of your life, as a gift.

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I'm not going to tell you which tool to start with. The honest answer is: whichever one you can get your hands on in the next hour. Don't let the brand choice become the thing that stops you. (If you're truly stuck, try Claude — it's the friendliest one I've found, and it's what I use most.)

And I'm not going to tell you that it's easy, because every week I still misuse this stuff in small and ridiculous ways. Yesterday I told my AI assistant — whose name is Charlie, that's a separate story — to use a paid tool I can't afford. He'd forgotten, across a different project, that we'd had that conversation. I got annoyed. I fixed it. Today, he knows.

You will do the same. You will mess up. You will be surprised. You will — a week after your first real AI session — catch yourself using it for something new and feel, for a moment, about twelve years younger than you did before.

You are not too old for this. You are not too late. The dogs I placed because of AI are proof that I wasn't, and I started when I was 54 and had no special skills. You don't need special skills. You need about a week.

See you next Tuesday.

— Annette