The compliment that should make us nervous

A few days ago I watched a video from Leonard Schmedding, who runs the biggest German-language AI channel. His claim, said flat out: retirees are better with AI than Gen Z. And he has a number that stings. On his channel there are more than twice as many viewers over 65 than viewers between 18 and 24. Millions of people, and the older ones show up in force while the digital natives are somewhere else.

I’m 62. I should have leaned back and enjoyed that. Finally someone on my side of the age line getting the credit. Instead I sat there feeling something closer to discomfort.

Because I know what a flattering number can do to a person. It can make you stop.

Let me be honest about the data first, because I don’t like winning an argument on half of it. If you measure who touches an AI tool most often, GenZ wins, and it isn’t close. In the big surveys they sit around eighty percent regular use. Boomers are somewhere between twenty and fifty, depending on the country. So the headline “Boomers are better with AI” is, taken literally, not true. The young use it far more.

What the studies also show is more interesting. The younger group tends to overestimate what it can actually do with these tools. One survey of two thousand employees found GenZ overrates its own AI skills roughly twice as often as Boomers do. Half of the AI requests students send are simple “do this for me” tasks, handed off and accepted without a second look. Meanwhile the older users who do engage are the ones who question the output, check it, distrust it a little. They’ve spent decades being responsible for budgets and people and mistakes, so a confident machine doesn’t automatically get their trust.

That’s the real split. GenZ has the fluency. Boomers, the ones who show up, bring the judgment. Neither of those is the whole game.

But this is where I want to get off the comfortable seat, because the flattering version of this story is exactly the trap.

If you are 60 or 65 and you take away from all this “see, we’re actually the smart ones,” you’ve just been handed a reason to do nothing. Judgment without use is worthless. You can’t audit an output you never generated. Being good at questioning AI means nothing if you never open the thing. The compliment feels like an achievement. It’s really just a starting line dressed up as a medal.

And there is a reason this matters more for my generation than for the twenty-year-olds, even if the twenty-year-olds click more.

My pension will be around 2,000 euros net if I’m lucky. My cost of living is well above that. I’m not an exception. A large part of the Boomer generation is walking into a decade where the old plan, work until 65, then rest, quietly stopped adding up. At the same time the tools to build something on your own, a second income, a small business, a channel, a service, have never been this cheap or this reachable. Five years ago what I do now would have needed a studio, a team, and money I didn’t have. Today it needs a laptop, a bit of patience, and the willingness to look stupid for a few weeks while you learn.

That last part is the actual barrier. Not the technology. I’ve been teaching people the technical side for 35 years and I can get almost anyone through the buttons in an afternoon. What stops people my age is the quiet voice that says: this is for the young, I’ve missed it, my grandkids know this better than me. Schmedding’s number is the argument against that voice. Very often you already know more than your kids. You just haven’t tested it.

So I don’t fully buy his headline. GenZ isn’t lost, and Boomers aren’t secretly winning a race most of them never entered. But strip the flattery away and something true stays behind. This generation has the experience to use AI well and the economic reason to use it now. What it often lacks is permission, mostly the permission it needs to give itself.

Knowledge like this doesn’t come to your door. Nobody will drag you into it. The tools are sitting there, free or nearly free, and they don’t care how old you are.

If you’re on the older side of this and you’ve been telling yourself the AI wave already passed you by, I’d genuinely like to know: what’s the actual thing stopping you from opening the tool tomorrow morning and finding out how wrong that story is?