Mr. Altman, AI isn’t just for young workers: Wisdom and experience are the ultimate AI superpowers

Sam Altman’s concerns about older workers and AI miss a key point. This article presents a new, inspiring angle for freelancers and contractors to use their decades of experience as a unique advantage in the AI era.

You’ve heard it all. Artificial and Super Intelligence is going to change everything; it’s going to replace jobs, and the only people who’ll thrive are the young, tech-savvy digital natives.

Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has weighed in on this, expressing his concern for the “62-year-old that doesn’t want to go retrain.”

It’s a valid worry, but it misses an inspiring part of AI: what can be achieved when its research capabilities and prompts are combined with wisdom and years of industry experience.

The conversations are mistakenly focusing on what older workers and seasoned freelancers might lose, rather than what they stand to gain. This concept may be hard to swallow or even believe if you have just lost a contract or full-time position because your role was replaced by AI. A recent research project, however, tells a more nuanced tale.

Through the Australia-based Skills Horizon research project, which has been talking to global senior leaders across different industries, we’re hearing a powerful counter-narrative to the idea of AI being a disadvantage for older workers.

The existential challenge vs. The experience advantage

For many, the rise of AI is deeply unsettling. As one US-based CEO of a large multinational corporation told University of Sydney experts Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter as part of the Skills Horizon project, “AI can be a form of existential challenge, not only to what you’re doing, but how you view yourself.” It’s a fear that hits at the core of our professional identity.

However, 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 or gets things wrong.

The CEO of a South American creative agency put it bluntly:

Senior colleagues are using multiple AIs. If they don’t have the right solution, they re-prompt, iterate, but the juniors are satisfied with the first answer, they copy, paste and think they’re finished.

This highlights a major difference: one group is simply using a tool, while the other is truly directing it.

How you can be an AI conductor

The true advantage of experience lies in your ability to understand context and express it clearly. This skill is a form of “re-tooling” rather than “retraining”—you’re not abandoning your expertise; you’re applying it to a new platform.

Consider this example from the Skills Horizon research:

While a junior advertising creative might ask an AI to “Write copy for a sustainability campaign,” a seasoned account director knows to specify “Write conversational social media copy for a sustainable fashion brand targeting eco-conscious millennials, emphasising our client’s zero-waste manufacturing process and keeping the tone authentic but not preachy.”

This skill mirrors what experienced professionals do every day when briefing junior colleagues or freelancers: providing detailed instructions that account for audience, objectives, and constraints. It’s a competency developed through years of managing teams and projects, and it’s exactly what is needed to unlock AI’s true potential.

Your decades of experience have given you an intuitive understanding of your industry, a deep-seated knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. AI might be fast, but it lacks this wisdom. It’s a powerful engine, but you are the driver.

Your ability to spot what doesn’t quite fit, and to know what questions to ask, has never been more valuable.

Why Wisdom-as-a-Service is the future of AI integration

If the world is going to be forever changed, I for one want people with decades of real-world experience to be the ones poking the tires of any superintelligence; to not take the first response that pops up as the only response.  

So, for all those over 50s looking for work and asking their recruiter or headhunter whether they should hide their decades of experience on their CV or LinkedIn portfolio or cover their greying hairlines: Don’t.

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