Welcome to Not Too Old for AI

Three years ago, menopause nearly took me out.

Not in a poetic way. In a "I can't remember the word for refrigerator, I'm soaking through two shirts a day, and I've cried in a grocery store parking lot over nothing in particular" kind of way. I was 54, I had seven adopted kids, I had been a teacher for 30 years, and I had once built one of the internet's first major adoption websites from scratch in 1995, back when you had to explain to people what the internet was. I was not someone who fell apart easily.

But menopause had a different opinion.

What saved me, seriously, was research. I spent months digging into the science: estrogen, testosterone, perimenopause timelines, what the Women's Health Initiative study actually said versus what doctors were telling patients for 20 years afterward. And increasingly, I was using AI to help me do that research faster, understand it better, and find the studies I couldn't locate on my own.

That's when I realized: this tool is a lot more than a chatbot on your phone.

What I've actually built

I want to be clear about what I mean when I say I use AI, because it's probably not what you're picturing.

I'm not typing "write me a recipe" into ChatGPT and calling it a day. Since I started teaching myself AI tools at 54, I have built multi-agent content pipelines, deployed websites to Cloudflare, written Python scripts that automate weeks of manual work, and created a content repurposing system that takes medical videos and turns them into fully localized health content for doctors in other countries. I did most of this without a computer science background. I did it by working with AI, Claude Code specifically, the way you'd work with a very smart collaborator who never gets tired and never makes you feel dumb for asking.

I am now 57. I live part of the year in Mexico. I admin a 65,000-member expat Facebook group. And I'm still learning something new about AI nearly every week.

I'm telling you this not to impress you, but because there is a version of this for you, whatever your version of "building something real" looks like. And someone needs to say that out loud to the people who've been quietly wondering if they missed their window.

You didn't.

The two people I'm writing for

This newsletter is for two kinds of people, and I want to name them both directly.

The first is someone I'll call my grandmother (even though she's probably your age): a smart, curious person who hears about AI constantly and mostly wants to know what it's actually for. What does it do in a real day? The answer, honestly, is a lot. An AI assistant can be a companion for the hours when the house is too quiet, studies show that 35% of adults over 60 report loneliness, and AI isn't a replacement for human connection, but it's better than staring at the wall at 2am. It can help you figure out if the four medications your doctor prescribed interact badly with each other. It can build a personalized storybook starring your grandchild using tools like Custom Heroes, you upload a photo, pick an adventure, and it generates an illustrated book in about 30 minutes, no design skills needed. It can help you think through whether you have enough money to retire, or where in the world you might want to do it. It's a research partner, a creative collaborator, a planning tool, and sometimes just a smart thing to talk to when you're working through a decision.

The second person is someone who has been underestimating themselves. Maybe you've been told your whole life that you're "not a tech person." Maybe you're 62 and you've never written a line of code and you assume that ship has sailed. I want to specifically talk to you, because here's what I've watched happen with AI: the gap between "person who uses AI" and "person who builds things with AI" is smaller than it has ever been. You don't need to memorize syntax. You need to know what you want and how to explain it clearly, and after 50+ years of life, you are very good at knowing what you want and how to explain it. According to AARP's own research, generative AI use among adults 50+ jumped from 18% to 30% in a single year, 2024 to 2025. That growth is real, and it's happening whether the tech industry acknowledges it or not.

Don't underestimate yourself. You can actually build things.

What to expect here

Every week (or close to it), I'll write about something I'm actually doing with AI, what worked, what broke, what surprised me, and what I'd tell a smart friend over coffee who asked "okay but what are you really doing with this?"

Some issues will be practical: here's the tool, here's the use, here's exactly how to do it. Some will be more personal: here's the thing I was afraid of and why it turned out fine. Some will be about the bigger picture, the parts of AI nobody talks about with people over 50 because they assume we're not interested.

I'm not a tech journalist. I'm not a 28-year-old founder. I'm a 57-year-old teacher and entrepreneur who started building things on the internet in 1995 and never fully stopped, and who thinks the second half of life is genuinely one of the best times to be alive if you're willing to pay attention to what's in your hands.

This newsletter is at nottoooldforai.substack.com. Subscribe if you want a seat at the table.

We have work to do.

, Annette

P.S. If you know someone who's been sitting on the sideline of this AI thing because they think they're too old or too late, send them this. That's exactly who I'm writing for.