A municipal workshop in Chile teaches AI to older adults: digital inclusion as unfinished business

By Zendoric · September 11, 2026.

In Panquehue, a municipality in Chile's Valparaíso Region, a group of older adults spent a day learning something that until recently felt alien to them: using their phones for more than making calls and, above all, digitising and restoring old family photographs with the help of artificial intelligence tools. The activity was a Digital Integration Workshop organised by the electricity company Chilquinta together with the Municipality of Panquehue and the organisation Actualízate Chile, as reported by G5noticias. Besides photo restoration, attendees practised with everyday applications and with the company's own digital channels.

The testimonies gathered in the report are telling about the starting point: Carlos Henríquez said that before he «only knew how to make calls»; Angélica Carriel admitted that artificial intelligence had always frightened her; Lidia Sanhueza summed up the underlying problem with a phrase that probably rings true in many homes: «our children and grandchildren don't have the patience to teach us». From the municipality, Camila Aragón Correa, head of Social Programmes, was equally blunt: technology «is only going to grow over time» and older people need that support.

It is a local story, modest in scale —the available material gives no figures on participants or territorial coverage—, but it points to something we at Zendoric consider central to any honest assessment of AI: technology does not distribute itself. Our underlying thesis is that artificial intelligence can, in the long run, free up time and generate abundance; but that horizon is only reached if deliberate bridges exist —like this workshop— to bring the tool to those with the least access or confidence today. Without that work of human intermediation, AI does not reduce inequalities: it reproduces them, because those already comfortable in the digital world gain the advantage first, and those who are not spend ever longer watching from the outside.

There is also a short-term reading that should not be sugar-coated: older people are one of the groups most exposed to digital fraud and scams, precisely because of the unfamiliarity that workshops like this seek to reverse. Teaching AI literacy to this group is not just a matter of inclusion or nostalgia for recovering family photos; it is also protection against a digital environment whose deceptions grow ever more sophisticated. Initiatives like this one, replicated by more companies and municipalities, are the quiet —and unglamorous— infrastructure that will determine whether the coming decade of AI narrows or widens the generational divide. The technology is already here; what is missing, as the municipal official neatly puts it, is the support to get it to everyone.