BENGALURU: Almost four times a week, city-based entrepreneur Shreya Bajaj gets on a video conference session with a bunch of senior citizens from across the country. Over the course of the next hour or two, she teaches ‘senior students’ crucial skills required in the digital age – using everyday tech.
From payments to Canva, Google sheets to iOS, Bajaj has been hosting digital literacy classes for senior citizens since the pandemic through her platform EasyHai. But recently, after requests from some of her ‘students’, she has also started to teach AI, coaching seniors in the imprecise art of using tools like ChatGPT.
“When we originally started during the pandemic, it was mostly about teaching senior citizens how to pay their electricity bills online or order groceries. We didn’t really have a clear goal in mind. But after nearly three years, we teach over 40 digital literacy courses, helping people get up to speed on the latest and trending technologies and tools,” Bajaj shares, adding that a majority of her students are women since men prefer to have one-one sessions.
While tools like Canva, Google Sheets and more have more or less been the standard curriculum at EasyHai, after the launch of ChatGPT late last year, Bajaj started to get more and more requests from her students to teach them how to use the trendy tool. “I would love to take credit for all the course ideas, but without suggestions from my students, I wouldn’t have even imagined teaching AI tools,” she shares, adding that, unlike all the tools she previously taught, she herself was new to AI tools and had to get herself accustomed to them before she could start teaching. “ChatGPT definitely intrigued a lot of people.
They were excited by its possibilities. A younger group of entrepreneurs and marketers initially asked me to do a session. They wanted to know its use cases and benefits. So I started doing these big free sessions,” she shares.
But as she did more and more ChatGPT classes, she encountered lively debates about the future of AI and its impact on the world. “They were very excited about the technology, but they were more apprehensive about the tech. So then, I started researching more and decided to do classes about the limitations of AI in its current state and how to use it in an ethical manner. I think the whole game changed after that because they were like, they’re so much more aware,” she adds.
Bajaj says many of her students have put their knowledge of ChatGPT to creative and entrepreneurial use. “They use chatGPT to create scripts for Instagram reels, writing difficult emails, caption ideas, LinkedIn posts, and more,” she adds.