OpenAI Holds ChatGPT Workshops for Older Adults in …

Image: METAL

Summary

OpenAI Academy and OATS held the Older Adults AI Skills Jam, free in-person ChatGPT workshops for 1,000 older adults across 10 US cities, on September 16.
The sessions cover trip planning, understanding bills, and spotting scams, and flag urgent language, demands for secrecy, and suspicious links as warning signs.
OpenAI said the share of US messages associated with people 55 and older grew from 6% to nearly 10% in a year.

The same class opened on September 16 in Senior Planet classrooms in Denver, Colorado, Miami, Florida, and San Antonio, Texas. OpenAI Academy, together with Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) from AARP, is running free in-person ChatGPT workshops for 1,000 older adults across 10 US cities, under the name Older Adults AI Skills Jam. In the announcement that day, OpenAI said the event is part of a multi-year effort to help older adults build practical AI skills and stay safe online.

What the sessions cover is nothing grand. According to the announcement, the places where AI is useful to older adults are planning a trip, understanding a confusing letter or bill, spotting a possible scam, taking up a new hobby, and staying connected with family. OpenAI wrote, "AI should be useful and accessible to everyone," and explained that this means people of every age need the support to use these tools to make everyday life easier.

One number sits behind the program. OpenAI said that in the United States the share of messages associated with people 55 and older grew from 6% to nearly 10% in a year. The company's explanation is that older adults are increasingly using ChatGPT for practical guidance, finding information, and writing. If one in every ten conversations comes from someone 55 or older, teaching this group is closer to managing a user base than to charity.

One pillar of the workshop is online safety. The sessions point to urgent language, demands for secrecy, and suspicious links as common warning signs of a scam, and teach people to use ChatGPT as one more layer of scrutiny. The rule OpenAI put in the announcement is a single line: "pause, think, and ask." The company said people ask ChatGPT tens of millions of times a week to evaluate suspicious messages, emails, and websites, and explained that this education complements its broader work to prevent, detect, and disrupt fraud and scams.

The partners in all 10 cities are local organizations. Senior Planet covers Denver, Miami, San Antonio, Montgomery County in Maryland, and Queens in New York; the Mirowitz Center covers St. Louis, Missouri; Senior Community Services covers the Twin Cities in Minnesota; the Nashville Public Library and FiftyForward cover Nashville, Tennessee; Fresno EOC covers Fresno, California; and LEARN Idaho covers Boise, Idaho. Through a sociologist's eyes, this list is the heart of the announcement. Technology education takes hold when it arrives not through the company that teaches the tool but through the libraries and community centers that were already meeting older adults in their neighborhoods.

This workshop follows an announcement from a year ago. On September 26, 2025, OpenAI said it was launching a multi-year effort with AARP and OATS, starting with an OpenAI Academy video teaching people how to use ChatGPT to spot scams. According to that announcement, OpenAI worked with OATS in 2024 to launch a $2 million Societal Resilience Fund supported by Microsoft to strengthen the Senior Planet program. An AARP survey OpenAI cited at the time found that AI use among older adults had doubled and that another 30% were excited about its potential.

The list of what that partnership promised is in the announcement as well: updated in-person and online Senior Planet curriculum, subgrants to local partners, a refreshed AI for Older Adults Guide, a new course on protecting privacy and data, training for AARP state offices, and an annual national survey of AI use among older adults. In that post a year ago OpenAI wrote, "AI education should be a basic right in the Intelligence Age," and this announcement is that sentence turned into 10 classrooms.

Neither announcement, which METAL reviewed, gives the length of the curriculum, the number of instructors, or how participants were recruited. Instead they note that OpenAI Academy has held events in the same format for nonprofits, small businesses, and K-12 educators, and that at the time of the 2025 announcement the Academy was marking its first anniversary having helped more than 2 million people. According to reports, AARP works with people aged 50 and over, and OATS runs the Senior Planet digital skills program.

OpenAI has rolled out access programs for specific groups in quick succession over recent weeks. METAL has reported that OpenAI is funding $5 million in research on AI's effects on teenagers, and has covered the government program opening ChatGPT to 23 million US public employees. Teenagers, public employees, and now older adults: the sequence fills in the edges of the user base one age group and one occupation at a time.

Every time a new technology arrives, some group is the last to reach it, and older adults have often stood in that spot. In this announcement OpenAI said the questions, ideas, and experiences of workshop participants will shape future learning resources for older adults. A place where 1,000 people learn is at the same time a place where the company learns. For an AI company, teaching older adults is no longer a line item in social contribution but a matter of understanding one in every ten conversations.