There are few things more tragic in life than watching a middle-aged man try to look enthused during a corporate upskilling workshop on Artificial Intelligence. Politely nodding practised expressions and eagerly looking forward to day 5, when he can finally boast on LinkedIn, “Humbled to have completed ‘AI fundamentals in strategic decision’”.

And yet, in boardrooms across the nation, well-meaning HR teams—most of them in their early 30s and armed with PowerPoint slides full of buzzwords like “Reskill Revolution” and “Future-Ready Workforce” have declared that everyone must learn AI and Data Science.

Most 50 + old men struggle with setting up a VPN app on their phone or figuring out the difference between micro USB and USB C but training budgets are being ramped up with a vision to stuff the entire workforce from Bahadur the coffee boy to Benson, the COO with so much of AI in a 2 week long digital course, that if you ever were to jolt them awake in a Zoom call, they would blurt out “ Activation function for optimising gradient descent” spontaneously before going back to sleep. Meanwhile Data engineers, Math graduates etc who spent 4 years of studying Vector algebra, Bayesian probability and scribbling girls’ names on toilet walls, are wondering if it was worth spending their youth in lecture rooms with other unshaved geeks boasting bad breath when all they needed was 2 weeks, a laptop and an insecure personality.

This future proofing is, of course, not a completely new phenomenon…remember how digitalisation was going to change the future of the world, of course, that was before cloud was going to change the future of digitalisation. It would have been good, but then the stupid blockchain changed the future of the cloud. The future’s changing so rapidly that the present is just a melange of opportunity, fear and LinkedIn posts about opportunity and fear.

“Even us?” asks Vinay, a 52-year-old regional manager whose idea of big data is the Excel sheet he uses to track cricket match scores and a 25 GB downloaded video collection, which he has tactfully renamed as “Entertainment” and encrypted with a “Sunny666” password.

“Yes,” comes the response, with the conviction that only comes from swallowing corporate policies unquestioningly, usually with some chutney of mandatory training hours.

Now let me clarify. This isn’t about intelligence. Men in their 50s are perfectly capable of grasping complex ideas. They’ve navigated life, career, marriage, in-laws, teenage children, rising cholesterol, and have a loose understanding of the concept of buying and selling rates at money changer shops. They’ve survived the guttural modem gargles of the 90s, floppy disks, and bosses who couldn’t tell the difference between “Reply” and “Reply All” in Outlook. But asking them to learn AI is like asking a ballerina to learn rap.

Take the case of my friend Bharat, a respected senior VP at a respectable firm in a respectable industry. In fact, he is so respected that even Ola drivers reverentially kiss their phones and hold it against their foreheads before rejecting his ride. At a recent training session on Machine Learning, he spent 20 minutes earnestly nodding at terms like “backpropagation” and “gradient descent,” only to later whisper to me, “So when do we actually meet this machine that’s learning?”

You see, the problem isn’t learning. The problem is unlearning. Ageing is undeniable, and no matter how many Milo cups we drink and how many walnuts we eat, most of us are not going to be able to learn in our 50s to a level which really matters. It’s the same hard wiring which makes even a simple thing as learning a foreign language, difficult for adults as compared to a 4-year-old. So, if most can’t learn a foreign language within 2 years, how the hell are we going to learn AI to an acceptable level by doing a week-long course via Zoom? But in the parallel universe of fleeting LinkedIn glory and HR policies, reality is handcuffed and gagged while PR takes precedence

So now, suddenly, when faced with terms like “hyperparameter tuning” and “unsupervised learning,” a 50-year-old brain initiates its own version of a denial-of-service attack in these courses. While the young who have learnt differential calculus while still having their milk teeth glide through it, their parents who just about mastered decimal point on their wisdom teeth, are expected to swallow one entire generation of knowledge deficit in a couple of weeks and give a giant luminescent belch of radiating knowledge.

In all fairness, it’s not our fault. We were raised in an era of carbon copies, remote-less TVs, and phones that required rotary patience. Our go-to search engine was the office peon, and our primary data backup was a drawer marked “Misc.” Our complete school maths was learnt without using any Greek symbols. You can’t suddenly toss us into a world of TensorFlow, GANs, and Binary classifiers, and expect us to nod wisely like DeepMind interns. We are still recovering from being told that one can’t really eat at the Pivot table.

The truth is that our journey wasn’t built on algorithms. Its building blocks were people, instinct, and years of experience. You can’t boil it down into a data frame. Our superpower isn’t AI. It’s EI – Emotional Intelligence. We may not predict churn with precision, but we can tell from a single WhatsApp message that Jason from sales is about to quit.

So, what’s the solution?

Instead of trying to turn wise old lions into algorithm-chasing gazelles, play to our strengths. Pair us with the data-savvy Gen Zs. Let us share boardroom wisdom and impart human empathy, while someone else with a ponytail and a butterfly tattoo explains how to fine-tune a transformer model.

And HR? Please stop making us fill out post-training feedback forms where we have to rate “confidence in deploying AI solutions.” Just let us go back to our cubicles and continue being the silent anchors of stability where we learn to use GPT, Claude, Anthropic etc, to write emails and make presentations. AI for us is going to be like cars. We might learn driving, but there’s no bloody way we are going to understand how an internal combustion engine works.

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