AI for seniors in Bogotá: a 20-person pilot that previews the future of active aging

By Zendoric · September 27, 2026.

At the Centro Día Casa de la Sabiduría El Bosque, in the Bogotá locality of Engativá, close to 20 older adults spend three hours a day training in artificial intelligence tools. The program is run by the Secretaría Distrital de Integración Social (SDIS) — the agency that manages Bogotá's social services — through its Subdirección para la Vejez, in partnership with the Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (SENA), Colombia's free technical and vocational training body. The information comes from Portal Bogotá, the Mayor's Office official channel.

The instructor in charge, César Augusto Chacón Gómez of SENA, sums up the goal in a phrase that works almost as a slogan: AI is "a tool to make life easier for everyone". His point is no small one: teaching AI to older adults is, above all, a way of showing that the technology learning curve does not close with age.

The participants' testimonies flesh out that idea with very concrete uses. Ana Bela Rodríguez Velázquez, an educator, says she uses AI to do research before launching her own projects: getting to know clients and suppliers, tracking product trends across different time ranges and making use of social media to share images and short videos. Doli Estela Moreno, another attendee, highlights the savings in time and money and the ability to "develop projects, be clear and concise" thanks to these tools: marketing and management skills that until recently seemed reserved for young, digitally native profiles.

It is worth being honest about the scale. This is one center, twenty people, in a city of several million inhabitants. As sector context, the digital divide between generations remains, across Latin America, one of the most neglected fronts of technological inclusion: not only for lack of skills, but because of barriers to accessing devices and stable connectivity and, often, because of the social dismissal of the idea that an older person can — or should — learn AI. A well-executed pilot at a day center does not solve that; at best, it offers a replicable template if there is the will and the budget to scale it beyond Engativá.

That, for us, is what really matters about this story, beyond the local episode. It fits with something we have been arguing in this publication about AI's horizon: the abundance it can bring is not only material, it is also one of time and purpose, and it need not be reserved for working life in the strict sense. That an educator in the later stage of her life uses AI to launch a small business, research the market and produce her own content is exactly the kind of scenario that interests us when we talk about a technology that allows people to keep devoting themselves to what they are passionate about, without age marking a cut-off point. Active old age — with projects of one's own, not just care — is, in miniature, a sample of what we mean when we talk about post-scarcity societies.

The short-term risk is that these initiatives remain symbolic gestures unless they are accompanied by sustained investment in connectivity, devices and continuous training for the older population, which in the region is growing faster than the infrastructure designed to include it digitally. That learning has no expiration date is an appealing thesis; whether it holds up over time, beyond one day center and a one-off partnership between a city department and a training body, is the question that will really determine whether this was an isolated experiment or the first chapter of something bigger.