Have you ever sat in a meeting where someone half your age casually mentions \u201cprompting ChatGPT\u201d or \u201crunning this through AI\u201d, and felt a familiar knot in your stomach? You\u2019re not alone. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a growing narrative that artificial intelligence (AI) is inherently ageist<\/a>, that older workers will be disproportionately hit by job displacement and are more reluctant to adopt<\/a> AI tools. <\/p>\n But such assumptions \u2013 especially that youth is a built-in advantage when it comes to AI \u2013 might not actually hold. <\/p>\n While ageism in hiring<\/a> is a real concern, if you have decades of work experience, your skills, knowledge and judgement could be exactly what\u2019s needed to harness AI\u2019s power \u2013 without falling into its traps.<\/p>\n What does the research say?<\/p>\n The research on who benefits most from AI at work is surprisingly murky<\/a>, partly because it\u2019s still early days for systematic studies on AI and work. <\/p>\n Some research suggests<\/a> lower-skilled workers might have more to gain than high-skilled workers on certain straightforward tasks. The picture becomes much less clear under real-world conditions, especially for complex work that relies heavily on judgement and experience.<\/p>\n Through our Skills Horizon<\/a> research project, where we\u2019ve been talking to Australian and global senior leaders across different industries, we\u2019re hearing a more nuanced story. <\/p>\n Many older workers do experience AI as deeply unsettling. As one US-based CEO of a large multinational corporation told us:<\/p>\n AI can be a form of existential challenge, not only to what you\u2019re doing, but how you view yourself.<\/p>\n But leaders are also observing an important and unexpected distinction: experienced workers are often much better at judging the quality of AI outputs. This might become one of the most important skills, given that AI occasionally hallucinates<\/a> or gets things wrong.<\/p>\n The CEO of a South American creative agency put it bluntly: <\/p>\n Senior colleagues are using multiple AIs. If they don\u2019t have the right solution, they re-prompt, iterate, but the juniors are satisfied with the first answer, they copy, paste and think they\u2019re finished. They don\u2019t yet know what they are looking for, and the danger is that they will not learn what to look for if they keep working that way.<\/p>\n Experience as an AI advantage<\/p>\n Experienced workers have a crucial advantage when it comes to prompting AI<\/a>: they understand context and usually know how to express it clearly. <\/p>\n While a junior advertising creative might ask an AI to \u201cWrite copy for a sustainability campaign\u201d, a seasoned account director knows to specify \u201cWrite conversational social media copy for a sustainable fashion brand targeting eco-conscious millennials, emphasising our client\u2019s zero-waste manufacturing process and keeping the tone authentic but not preachy\u201d. <\/p>\n This skill mirrors what experienced professionals do when briefing junior colleagues or freelancers: providing detailed instructions, accounting for audience, objectives, and constraints. It\u2019s a competency developed through years of managing teams and projects.<\/p>\n Younger workers, despite their comfort with technology<\/a>, may actually be at a disadvantage here. There\u2019s a crucial difference between using technology frequently and using it well. <\/p>\n Many young people may become too accustomed to AI assistance. A survey<\/a> of US teens this year found 72% had used an AI companion app<\/a>. Some children and teens are turning to chatbots<\/a> for everyday decisions. <\/p>\n Without the professional experience to recognise when something doesn\u2019t quite fit, younger workers risk accepting AI responses that feel right \u2013 effectively \u201cvibing\u201d their work<\/a> \u2013 rather than developing the analytical skills to evaluate AI usefulness. <\/p>\n So what can you do?<\/p>\n First, everyone benefits from learning more about AI. In our time educating everyone from students to senior leaders and CEOs, we find that misunderstandings about how AI works have little to do with age. <\/p>\n A good place to start is reading up on what AI is and what it can do for you:<\/p>\n If you\u2019re not even sure which AI platform to try, we would recommend testing the most prominent ones, OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT<\/a>, Anthropic\u2019s Claude<\/a>, and Google\u2019s Gemini<\/a>.<\/p>\n