Teaching Seniors to Use ChatGPT on a Phone: What Worked in Montgomery

No laptops, no slides full of text, and one goal: by the end of lunch, everyone has asked an AI a real question and gotten something useful back.

By the end of lunch, people in the room were asking ChatGPT what they could cook with what was already in their fridge. Others were checking whether an email, a text or a letter was a scam.

That was Tech for Seniors, Montgomery TechLab's September Tech Talk at St John AME Church on Madison Avenue, sponsored by AARP Alabama. MMI ran the session. There were no laptops and no slides full of text. Everyone worked on their own phone.

Here is how we approached it, and what we would tell anyone trying to do the same.

Design the session for the hands in the room

Every AI workshop we run starts with the same question: what will people actually have in front of them? For this room the answer was a phone, often a phone with the text size turned up. That decision shaped everything.

We taught ChatGPT in the mobile app, because that is what most people already had or could install in two minutes. We kept every instruction to one step at a time. We put the exact words to type on a large screen at the front and read them out loud. And we did not move on until the room had caught up, because a workshop where half the room is lost is not a workshop.

Three things, not thirty

We covered three skills and nothing else.

Asking a question in plain language. Not "how do I prompt." Just talking to it the way you would ask a knowledgeable friend. What can I make for dinner with chicken, rice and half a bag of spinach. What should I say in a text to my grandson who just started college.

Using photos and documents. Taking a picture of a letter, a form, a prescription or a menu and asking what it says or what to do about it. For many people this was the moment it clicked. The phone's camera is something they already know how to use, and pointing it at a confusing piece of paper and getting a plain-English explanation is useful right away.

It is also how we covered fraud. Paste in the email, the text, or a photo of the letter, and ask whether it looks like a scam and why.

Editing what it gives you. Asking for a shorter answer, a simpler one, or a different tone. The lesson underneath is that the first answer is a draft, not a verdict, and you are allowed to push back.

What we left out on purpose

We did not explain how language models work. We did not compare ChatGPT to Claude or Gemini. We did not talk about hallucinations as a concept, though we did show, concretely, that you should double-check anything about money, medicine or legal matters with a real person.

That kind of framing is useful for a technical audience. For this room it would have taken the time we needed for hands-on practice.

Why we do sessions like this

MMI is a software company. We build voice agents, automations and custom systems for businesses in Montgomery and across the Gulf. Teaching a room of seniors to use ChatGPT does not sell any of that, and that is fine. The gap between people who get value from AI and people who do not has never been about intelligence. It is about exposure, and someone has to provide it.

What stayed with us was how the room felt at the end. People had learned something new and done it themselves.

Thanks to Montgomery TechLab for hosting and to AARP Alabama for sponsoring the session and the lunch.

If your organization serves a community that would benefit from the same kind of session, with plain language, their own devices and real tasks, we would be glad to run one. Get in touch, or see the other sessions we have run.