Grandparents – The Secret Weapon in the Technological Revolution

We have got something rather wrong in the way we talk about generations and technology. The assumption is that younger people understand technology and their parents and grandparents are forever trying to catch up. Ask a grandchild how to do something on your phone and they will probably sort it in seconds, quite possibly with a slight look of despair at your incompetence.But AI changes this rather dramatically.

In our new book, Expiry Date Never: Age is the New Superpower, Louise Ballard and I argue that age and experience could become more valuable in an AI world, not less. AI can research a market, write an email, suggest a business idea or produce a blog. What it doesn’t have is 40, 50 or 60 years of experience to judge whether what it has produced is actually any good. I use AI a lot. It can be brilliant. But I have also learned when to be suspicious of an answer, when something doesn’t sound quite right and when to go back and check the original source. And I regularly tell it that its work is sloppy, especially around hallucinations. That ability to question what we are given is going to be one of the most important skills in an AI world. Grandparents could have a hugely important role to play.

Start by using AI yourself
First, grandparents need to use AI. Not do a course on it or become experts, but just start playing. One of the best ways to understand AI is to ask it about something you know really well. Ask it to research the industry you worked in, explain something you have spent years doing or write an email you might send. Challenge its answers. Then think about how you knew something wasn’t right. Was a fact wrong? Had it missed the point? Was the answer technically correct but unrealistic? After decades of work and life, we recognise when something doesn’t ring true because we have seen versions of it before. So ask questions together. How do we know this is true? Where did the information come from? What might it have missed? Is this actually a good idea or just a convincing answer? AI is extraordinarily good at sounding confident. So are quite a few human beings I have met over the years. Experience teaches you that confidence and competence are not the same thing.

Test the business idea together
In Expiry Date Never, we look at how AI can help people understand new markets, develop ideas and learn new skills. For someone starting their first business, that can transform the early stages. Imagine your grandchild has an idea for making money from something they love. Sit down together and use AI to pull the idea apart. Who would buy it? What problem does it solve? Who are the competitors? What are they charging? Is the market growing? What would it cost to get started? What skills would they need? And, crucially, what could go wrong? In half an hour, you can explore questions that once might have taken weeks of research. But this is where the combination of AI and experience becomes really interesting. AI may produce a beautifully convincing analysis showing there is a market. A grandparent can ask, “Yes, but will anyone actually pay for this?”

So go and find out. Talk to potential customers. Ask what they currently do. What frustrates them? What would make them change? Would they really pay £20 for your idea or are they just being polite? For someone starting their first business, particularly if they haven’t yet had much experience of working inside organisations, a grandparent can be a useful independent sounding board. They may recognise assumptions that need testing or questions that haven’t yet been asked. But the learning works both ways. A grandchild may understand an online community, technology or emerging market that their grandparent knows nothing about. Explore it together. And don’t assume the entrepreneur is necessarily the grandchild. Grandparents are starting businesses too. Entrepreneurship doesn’t have an age limit.

Open up your contacts
There is another role grandparents can play which has nothing to do with the age or experience of the entrepreneur. After 40 or 50 years of working and living, many grandparents have extraordinary networks without thinking of them as networks at all. Former colleagues, clients, suppliers and friends as well as people they have met through professional bodies, sport and community activities. And AI can sift their contacts in microseconds to find the people most helpful for different tasks. Who understands the market the entrepreneur wants to enter? Who has built a similar business? Who knows about exporting, investment or manufacturing? Who could make an introduction to a potential customer, supplier or adviser? Who might spend 20 minutes sharing what they learned from doing something similar? This could be valuable to an entrepreneur of 25, 45 or 65.

Grandparents can also help entrepreneurs think about how to approach people they don’t already know. Research the business and the people in it. See who is active online, what they are talking about and where you might have something useful to contribute. If a chief executive has been on LinkedIn for years and has 349 connections, don’t waste weeks trying to engage with them. Find someone in the organisation who has proper online conversations. And a grandparent can help spot the difference between automated responses and real-life ones.

AI can do much of this research in a fraction of the time it once took. It can help identify the right people and even draft that first approach. But the human judgement still matters. Why should this person want to respond? What could you offer them rather than immediately asking them for something? AI can make finding and approaching the right people dramatically faster. Experience can help make sure you don’t annoy them when you get there.

Tap into the unretired generation
There is a much bigger opportunity behind those contacts. Many of what we call the unretired generation are actively looking for interesting and purposeful ways to use their experience. This is a key theme in Expiry Date Never and something we see constantly through our work at Next-Up. From the start of my business, Next-Up, we have brought people from the unretired generation together with tech entrepreneurs and other founders as mentors. Initially, both sides often assumed the other wouldn’t be particularly interested in what they had to say. It couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The more experienced mentors would sometimes say, “But I know nothing about tech.” My answer was, “You don’t need to. They know about the tech.” What they bring is decades of experience of people, relationships, organisations and difficult decisions. They can recognise when the relationship between founding partners has run its course and help explore the options. When an entrepreneur tells you she is brilliant at motivating her team when they are in the office, but it isn’t working with employees scattered around the world, you can start asking about time differences, how they communicate and whether an email written in one mood is being read in quite another.

When someone is entering a new market, experience helps you spot the risks they may not yet have considered and explore different ways to approach it. And when an entrepreneur is simply floundering – as most do at some point – someone who has lived through difficult periods in business can provide perspective and encouragement. That is the value of experience. You don’t need to understand the technology better than the entrepreneur. They know their business. You bring years of recognising patterns, asking questions, dealing with people and knowing that there is usually more than one way through a problem. There are an enormous pool of this experience and entrepreneurs constantly need expertise, contacts, introductions and sounding boards. Why aren’t we connecting the two?

Don’t leave grandparents out of the technological revolution
We are in danger of dividing society into younger people who understand the future and experienced people whose useful contribution is supposedly behind them. It is one of the assumptions we challenge throughout Expiry Date Never. We are going to live and work for far longer while AI changes business at extraordinary speed. It makes no sense to discard decades of knowledge, contacts and judgement just when technology needs people capable of questioning its output. Nor should grandparents stand on the sidelines and decide AI is something for younger people.

Use it. Play with it. Get things wrong. Ask your grandchildren to show you what they are doing with it and show them what you are doing too. The grandchild may be the entrepreneur. The grandparent may be the entrepreneur. One may understand the technology and the other may have decades of experience of people and business. Most likely, each has something the other doesn’t. The technological revolution isn’t going to work particularly well if one generation brings the technology and another keeps its experience to itself. Perhaps one of the best things a grandparent can give an entrepreneur in the AI age isn’t an answer at all. AI has plenty of those. It is the experience to know when to question the answer, the confidence to test it in the real world and perhaps an introduction or two to help open the first door.