At 63, Gretchen Schoser Is Bringing AI Education to the Places the Industry Skipped
Her goal is to help leaders of smaller organizations use AI as a thought partner rather than a replacement for human judgment.
While adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) races through enterprise boardrooms and coastal tech hubs, an entire segment of the American economy is being left out of the conversation. Small businesses, nonprofits, libraries, local organizations, older adults, and rural communities are running real operations with real constraints, and too few organizations are providing practical, beginner-friendly AI education.
Gretchen Schoser is providing it out of her local library.
“The biggest AI gap is not technology. It is confidence,” Schoser says. “People need someone willing to teach them without making them feel stupid.”
Schoser is the founder and lead consultant of Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions, a company that helps small- and mid-size organizations adopt AI while improving employee experience. After a decades-long career helping organizations navigate technology change, including 18 years in the UKG ecosystem working on recruiting, onboarding, and talent management, Schoser believes AI adoption succeeds or fails for the same reason every major transformation does: people.
Schoser recognized that AI presented a familiar challenge. Success would depend less on the technology itself and more on whether people felt prepared to use it.
That is not how most AI adoption is sold. Productivity gets the attention while decision fatigue and workplace overwhelm go unaddressed. Her work increasingly centers on helping leaders use AI as a thought partner rather than a replacement for human judgment, an approach reflected in her SHIFT framework for reducing cognitive overload while keeping people at the center of decision-making.
The same philosophy shapes the applications she is building, practical AI tools designed to reduce cognitive overload, improve decision-making, and help people build confidence rather than dependency.
The case for teaching AI outside the tech hubs
The education work happens closer to home, and it is deliberate. Schoser lives in Groton, N.Y., and has focused her work on rural America at a time when much of the AI conversation centers on large corporations, major cities, and established tech hubs.
The gap she is focusing on closing runs in two directions. There is an access gap, because the training simply does not reach small towns. And there is a confidence gap, because the people in them have absorbed the message that this technology belongs to someone younger, somewhere else, with a different degree.
She teaches free AI classes at the Groton Public Library and built Learning AI With Gretchen, a free platform aimed at complete beginners, with one rule underneath it all: nobody should feel embarrassed or inadequate for starting at the beginning. She has presented on responsible AI adoption for the Tompkins Chamber of Commerce.
Her own path gives the position some weight. She founded a company in her sixties, lives in a small town in upstate New York, in the field most associated with people a third of her age.
As AI moves from early enterprise deployment toward broad economic infrastructure, the question of who gets trained becomes a question of who gets to participate. Schoser intends to be the person making sure the answer includes the people the industry has not bothered to ask.
“Technology has the power to open doors,” Schoser says. “My goal is to make sure those doors are open for everyone, not just the people who happen to live in the right ZIP code or work for the largest companies.”
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