AI After 50

John: What we're doing is extending the, beyond the personal advice that AI can help you as your thought, partner and assistant. and taking it more with a business focus and thinking about, as Mark said, how do we use it to strategize? How do we develop an approach to our businesses that we weren't using before. Thanks to AI and have it help us analyze our business, and doing that, amazing things can happen. And I've been doing that now for a couple years now, and it's been my advisory board in a sense in helping me make business decisions. And sometimes it just confirms that you're on the right track.
Welcome to AI After 50 the podcast for experienced professionals who wanna keep learning and stay effective at work. Each week, Mark Tennant and John Paganini show you how to use AI in practical everyday ways so it becomes part of how you think, plan, and get work done. If you're over 50 and still working, this show helps you move forward with confidence.

Mark: Hey, welcome back to AI After 50. Mark Tennant here. John Paganini is over there. And, thanks so much for joining us. We're recording this on Friday, February the 20th, 2026. And quick reminder about our show notes. We'll have show notes available in detail, along with this podcast where we're.

Whatever platform you're watching on, but also we offer premium show notes and you can sign up for those. We include a little bit extra things we didn't cover in the, podcast because of time constraints, but stuff we wanted to let you know about.

That link also to sign up for premium show notes is right in the description of the platform.

You're watching this on or listening on. John, how we doing? It's uh,

John: Mark.

Of things going on as always. I mean, every week it's, this model's getting better, this model's doing advertising. So much happening out there. Yeah.

Mark: And it really got big over the last 10 days or so.

When we started the podcast, we kind of started out with the AI basics, you know, some prompting things, how to talk to the AI, kind of beginner stuff. But you know, after listening to the past shows and reflecting John, I, you know, I realized that while the content was good, I thought we weren't reaching the people who needed to needed it most.

And that's the people that are listening now, and because the, the years of experience, these men and women have the 20, 30, 40 years of experience and of our over 50 audience, many of them are in senior leadership, certainly in manager positions. And I think we need, they need to change the way they're thinking about this, and this is what we're here to do, to try to help 'em understand, you know, how the technology works, how it can change the way they lead, they strategize, and how they make decisions.

John: All those good things and, and, and much more. What we're doing is extending the, beyond the personal, advice that, AI can help you as your thought, partner and assistant. and taking it, more with a business focus and thinking about, as Mark said, how do we use it to strategize? How do we develop an approach to our businesses that we weren't using before. Thanks to AI and have it help us analyze our business and, doing that, amazing things can happen. And I've been doing that now for a couple years now, and it's been my, my advisory board in a sense in helping me make business decisions. And sometimes it just confirms that you're on the right track.

Mark: Yeah.

John: it says, good, however did you think about this? And I said, goodness,

Mark: Right,

John: that is a very good point. But you know, you remain the thought leader in a sense, and this is your thought partner. So a new way of thinking about your business life in many ways.

Mark: And, and as we said, with leadership positions, you know, you've, they're gonna have to take the lead on this, John, and what really changed it for me, because over the last two weeks have been really thinking about how to reshape, what, what are we doing?

We're doing something right, but it just didn't feel right. And this is where we move to, you know, how to be an AI Thinker, how to think about it and lead with AI in your company business, wherever it is that, um, you work.

John: Note, Mark, a lot of times, um. AI strategies or implementation, C can come from the top down, typically in

Mark: it has to, it has to.

John: Um, but it has come from the middle and, you know, and, uh. of the, the younger people saying, we, we, I'm using AI to do this, and Wow. Look at the results I got.

Mark: And, and that starts with the leadership and, and thinking like an AI leader. And what really tipped for me was about 10 days ago, guy by the name of Matt Schumer. He's a startup, AI startup, CEO. Matt's been in the game for 15, 16 years. And then of course when this generation of AI came out in 2022, he was all over it.

But he wrote an article that came out. And it was went viral on the, I mean, mega viral alone on Twitter 84 million times this article was viewed, and I know last week on my LinkedIn feed, and as you mentioned, of course, yourself, when we talked this week, it, it was all over the place. And actually. It's called Something big is happening.

And essentially what Matt was saying in this was, and, and, and we live this, John and I, when we go out, people know we're into AI and they know we do a lot of things with AI. We know we teach it and we talk about it and those types of things. But what the conversation we always have is, Hey Mark, hey, what's going on with AI?

And it's just kind of a casual conversation. And Matt in the article talks about this is kind of his cocktail version. And I guess that's what we give, um, when we talk about AI because. There's only so much, you know, from a technical standpoint that people kind of really get, they need to be getting more of it, and that's what we're here for.

But it's, it's it, the conversation was like that. But what happened at the beginning of the month with the new Claude update, especially with Claude Code, which is just simply terrific and amazing. And then also Gemini, they just released 3.1 Pro yesterday on their platform. The reasoning of these models has got exponentially better.

And it really happened overnight. And he also compares this, I guess, wake up moment to something happening moment to COVID I, in 2020 when, you know, you had this thing around this flu, this virus, whatever it was, and all of a sudden it hit and then the world, all of our world's changed. And he kind of likens it to that.

And I, and I'm pretty much the same way because. People we talk to have no idea the capabilities that these models can have. They're using free versions Now. You need to be using these paid versions to really get the most outta these models. You're gonna be an AI leader. It, it's a must.

John: that COVID comparison was funny because traditionally AI has been compared to, you know, the invention of the book. You know, the railroad,

Mark: The internet,

John: internet, the, you

Mark: computers.

John: and all of a sudden COVID.

Mark: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

John: Yeah, so, so as leaders, executives, McKinsey, the folks there, do great jobs with their surveys. I read 'em and use 'em all the time, reference 'em a lot. Gartner's another one. But on a couple of McKinsey, uh, studies from 2025, uh, and just some quick stats we're gonna throw at you.

68% of executives feel they're unprepared for AI integration. That's a lot. And that's just the people that are honest that answered that question. And then the. It didn't surprise me because based off of who John and I talked to quite a bit, only 26% of workers between 55 and 64 have extensive AI familiarity, and it's the lowest of any age group.

And these studies, uh, are constantly coming. You know, typically you'd see studies you like this, you know, maybe once a year or sometimes uh, six months, but the numbers are just changing dramatically.

Mark: And to compliment those numbers, Mark, from an organizational perspective, 60% are just in the early AI exploration mode of, you know, organizations that are out there. Are piloting AI right now. So, uh, if you look at that, you know, some have operationalized it, but, uh, uh, just a 5% of the organizations out there today feel that they're proficient, whatever that means in a sense. But, there's so much growth potential. I bet if we did this in a quarter, those numbers would change every quarter.

John: In fact, we should keep, um, keep these figures close at hand as we move through our podcasts.

Mark: from 2026 because it's starting to, you know.

John: This is the year.

Mark: Yep.

John: is absolutely the year. Not just the Agentic AI, but just AI becomes part of the overall organization's strategic direction,

Mark: and it's not AI for AI's sake. thing we've got to talk about is you look for the problem, look for the workflow issue, whatever it is that you wanna work on, and then say how and where does AI fit into that equation.

John: Yeah, and you're right. You know, it's not about, the gap isn't the talent or the intelligence or anything like that, few professionals are speaking to our audience, this audience over 50, especially leadership positions, management positions, senior positions, they're just not.

Mark: That changes now, with this podcast going forward. And we hope, we hope you like it. We hope you keep coming back. So, real quick, these two schmos, two guys here that's in your ears. Who are we? And, uh, why you should listen.

My journey began in 2015 when Paul Roetzer, the CEO of Smarter X, which is a company here in Cleveland also the AI Marketing Institute, gave a talk at a small gathering I was at on machine learning, and I was hooked from there and saw and watched every, um, LinkedIn course, I could.

And then November of 22 comes around chat, GPT, and it just changed everything in my life. And since then. John and I have been working together for a couple of years and, um, now we're building the tools.

We're building the custom GPT. We're all up in it. We're using Claude code. We're using AI visual studios to build applications and we're, we're actively doing this.

One I started that John and I collaborated on SB one here in the state of Ohio Senate Bill one. It is. An initiative and we created a compliance checker that universities and community colleges here in the state can take their policies, match them up against the law, the new law, SB one, and being able to distinguish what's right, what's wrong, where they need improvement.

And that's because these models are reasoning, and we talked about that a little bit earlier. There's so much better now than they were even a year ago. This. This is why. It's just, it's just a necessity. The leaders have to get on board and have to start figuring out how they're gonna roll this out and integrate this in their company.

John: Yeah.

And John, just your journey even was longer than mine.

Well, it started in, uh, you know, 1956 when me and some other professors from, uh, Dartmouth gathered around and said, I think a computer can do artificial intelligence and be a human. Now, actually, uh, you know, if you think about AI in, in many sense is it's algorithms, right?

And, um, as somebody who's been developing for years and years, uh, solutions, um. It's, you know, when does AI actually kick in? But, for me it was with respect to, uh, radiology when we actually had technology that would look at images and, uh, this is about 2006 and oh seven. It would look at the images and say, okay, I think there might be a benign. Uh, something there in the image and it alerted the radiologist to looking at the image closer. And these technology are just now really becoming part of the, uh, everyday workflow in, in the healthcare organizations. I also worked on the IBM Watson, which was quite exciting and really opened my eyes to the power of AI when it would take electronic, uh, health record information. And feed it to an engine. And the, that IBM Watson would then come back and go, well, I'm 80% confident it could be diabetes, but if I had this much more information, I could get you to a higher level of confidence. And those kind of eye-opening scenarios really demonstrated the power of where we're going with this.

And Mark, I assume, you know, we're gonna be talking about how uh, the healthcare aspect of these AI engines really can help us.

Mark: Certainly down the road we will be doing that and, and a lot more. And I also wanted to, what I thought was fascinating, John said to me a few weeks ago, Hey, you gotta try out this Auto Vision Garage. I created John, talk about what you built there. And it's a hobby for John. But I guess the point is here we're building these tools, we're using these.

John: photography is a hobby. Um, I, I, and I said, well, what if there was a tool where the people who by these photos, automotive photos, or have automotive photos on their phone could enhance those images, by uploading them to this system. And that system is, uh, in the sense it's a design garage, so it has a whole automotive garage feel to it, which is a

Mark: It does. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.

John: Yep. So it walks the user through, uh, guided prompts, says, you know, where is the scene, and then it goes to another engine and, uh, expands on that. Description, you might say it's a beach, it might come back. Say it's a sunny beach in Florida,

Mark: It works great.

John: and birds. Uh, yeah. So it's, it's

Mark: Yeah.

John: right now.

But that was a Claude Code, initiative with a combination of using ChatGPT as the product designer. And the code was built using, Claude Code. So it was kind of a collaboration, which for me was like having the two of the smartest people on the planet on your team to

Mark: Yeah,

John: So all you have to do is visualize what you're looking for, um, and then expand on that.

Mark: And so what we tell you all this because. It's our expertise that's gonna be your advantage. And this is what we hope we bring to the podcast. And I know we will because we are chewing the dirt. We're working with these tools, we're doing a lot of the work that you won't have to do. We're gonna guide you now, and it's gonna be, a more simpler road for you than it was for us, although we lean into this stuff and, and we just love it.

And again, we're not saying this to brag. We just want to be able to pass our knowledge along to you

John: gonna

Mark: via this podcast.

John: we wanna share our learnings.

Mark: That's exactly right. Yep. For those who, um, you know, choose to lean into it, this is gonna be your place to be.

So what we decided on was maybe kind of rotating formats, if you will, but all the content will be focused right to you.

We're gonna do things about, you know, looking at AI through from a, uh, strategic position through a leadership lens, if you will. Becoming that AI champion, even if you're not a senior executive or a senior leader, I'm sure with all of the years and years of experience have, you have somebody's ear and people's attention, and we're gonna want you to be that AI leader, that AI champion at your business.

We're gonna talk about how to do that and how to start working with these tools. One of them is. Start using the paid versions of these tools, but we'll get into that in a moment. And then finally, the experience edge. What that is your ace in a hole that is, you know, what John talked about earlier with the younger age people, everybody maybe in our age thinking like, oh, they've, they've got this.

We, you know, we don't have to do this. Or they're maybe a little intimidated the experience, your experience is your edgeness and, and you're gonna find that out when you start working with these tools

John: that's a good point, Mark. 'cause really, AI is great at this. As we mentioned earlier, it generates all the options. Um, and you have to re remain the thought leader in that sense and drive it. But it'll give you all these options, ideas, strategies, either confirm or deny. I that this is a good idea, expand those horizons. But as the human in the loop and we say human in the loop or we say human in the middle, it doesn't know which option really fits your organizational strategy, your politics, your culture. What is the risk involved, what's the position in the market? You know, it doesn't know all those things. Uh, so that is really where that decades of experience that the older generations have. Uh, that really contributes to the power of leveraging AI, to move your organization forward. It provi, you know, AI is the context,

Mark: that, that certainly is, and, and especially if you're in a leadership role or you spent, you know, decades building your expertise in your field. As we say, AI, it's not a threat, just you, it's your ace in the hole. It's your biggest amplifier of your experience and being able to take that information in your head and creating your own AI library, if you will.

We'll be talking about that in coming episodes, but it's huge. And you'll, you'll start to see this when you start working with these paid tools. $20 a month, you need to go out today chat, GBT, great place to start. They offer so much more, uh, for $20 a month than the free version does, and you get the full capabilities of these models and you start understanding how to work with these things.

So, um, as John say, start with that problem. It's just a tool. It's your partner and um, I like your analogy of having two of the smartest people in the world when you're developing code right at your fingertips and you're able to do it with just voice and text.

John: in, the, Google's in the mix too. So it depends on your tools, but you've got those resources.

Mark: Yeah, Mark, I, I couldn't agree more being an amplifier, if you will, that, uh, AI is U plus AI is actually the fusion of those two powerful tools, right? And there's no limit when you think about it. And I, I felt like that and some of the, uh, the things I've been working on, there's just no limit to what you can do, what you can think about.

In fact, I had a, a situation where, um, I had to develop an app, a parking app to uh,

John: All right.

Mark: violations and stuff, and I, I knew just because of the tools and the power of them, that that would not. Take a long time to build something like that. You know, you go through a couple iterations, but all of a sudden after a couple hours, wow, you've got something that really is amazing.

John: Uh, and that's, that's new to the world because if you've been developing applications, you know, that could take

Mark: Weeks

John: weeks, months, depending on the size

Mark: debugging.

John: the, the, the time has been compressed. And that becomes a competitive advantage, doesn't it?

Mark: Oh yeah,

John: you can move quickly and, you know, when we talk about AI's use in marketing, as you brought up, uh, initially, uh, and other areas too.

Uh, wow. Wow.

Mark: and, and that's where I guess the idea of start using these paid tools because it's so much more than a glorified Google or so much more that to just summarize meetings or write content, the. Capabilities and the reasoning aspects of these models now have just changed and literally overnight, which was the COVID reference we mentioned earlier.

So we're going to be going through these things every single week and, uh, we, during the last way we were doing the podcast, we would give an exercise something for you to do,

Not really homework, but something to like get involved with AI and so what we're going to do this week.

First of all, get on a paid app this time. Put your $20 down for a month. It's 20 bucks. You can do it. You can afford this and chat GBT is fine. And plus you open up so many more capabilities of the model that you just don't get with the free version and more of it. So open up a paid version of your favorite model and ask it.

One business question. You've been thinking about one problem, one area. It could solve, maybe a task that's repetitive, something, and just see how it responds to you. See how the AI handles it. And then from there you'll just start talking and you'll be able to talk these things out. And that's just essentially, a rudimentary first conversation with a paid model that I think, well, I know you will see the difference than what you're getting in a free version.

John will be headed to Italy this afternoon to finish up, uh, what started a couple of weeks ago with the Olympics. Meet up with some family and enjoy himself. I'll be back with you next week.