Every child, AI-literate by 18.

I'm a mother of two girls. I've worked in tech for most of my career, and today I work in the AI and robotics sector. AI and robotics are also my biggest personal interest — something I explore and follow in my private time as much as in my professional life. As a woman in tech and AI, and as an entrepreneur who has run my own companies in the past, I have seen a big shift in mindset around what technology can do and who it is for. That shift is what made me want to build this website.

When I was at school in the 1990s, my teachers were still trying to teach us *shorthand* (a fast handwriting system used by secretaries) and how to type on actual typewriters. Computer lessons? Those came in much later, and even now in many schools they're a recent addition. Meanwhile the children who happened to have a computer at home — usually because a parent was curious or willing — quietly raced ahead. Thirty years later, the gap between those who adapted and those who didn't is still defining careers.

Now I see the same pattern playing out with *AI* (artificial intelligence — software that can learn from examples and produce answers, images or code on demand). I meet brilliant, capable adults every week who are genuinely struggling to understand what this technology is, what it can do, and how to use it without feeling foolish.

Learn it early, like ballet or football

Think back to the early 2000s. In restaurants, parents would put a cartoon on YouTube and hand the phone over so they could eat in peace. What happened next surprised everyone: three-year-olds learned to swipe, tap, skip videos, open apps and make music — fast. The children who grew up handling those devices became the ones who later mastered them most fluently.

AI is exactly the same. If you start ballet, piano or football at six, you're likely to be far better at it at sixteen than someone who picked it up last year. We don't have to hand a chatbot to a child and walk away — but we do need to sit beside them and start. Two hours together exploring what AI is, what it can do, and what it shouldn't do is worth more than a hundred hours of unsupervised scrolling.

Question every answer. Then question it again.

The single most important habit we want to pass on is this: don't believe the first thing an AI tells you. Large language models hallucinate. Images are getting harder to tell from real photographs. Deepfakes are everywhere.

The way out is to debate with the AI, not just consume it. Ask "are you sure?", "what's your source?", "what's the counter-argument?". Take what one tool tells you and run it past another — research on ChatGPT, cross-check with DeepSeek, verify with Claude. AI can check AI. That cross-examining habit, learned young, is what protects a child from being fooled — and what turns AI into a genuine thinking partner instead of an answer machine.

Ethics before output

Before "how do I get a great answer", the question is "should I be asking this, and what do I do with what comes back?". We talk openly about honesty, attribution, privacy, kindness online and the line between using AI as a coach and using it to cheat. The ethics conversation matters more than the prompt.

Most people barely scratch the surface

Some adults use AI for the basics — asking *ChatGPT* (a popular AI chatbot made by OpenAI) for a recipe, generating an image for a birthday card, drafting an email, translating a message, planning a holiday, or summarising a long article. Essentially, a more modern Google. That's lovely, but it's a tiny fraction of what these tools can actually do.

The same *LLMs* (large language models — the engines behind ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, DeepSeek and others) can debate with you to sharpen your thinking, coach a child through a difficult maths problem, support a learner with *dyslexia* (a common difference in how the brain processes written language) by reading aloud and rephrasing, help a teacher build a lesson plan in minutes, or walk a student through an essay rewrite without doing the thinking for them.

I understand why some teachers push back

A lot of schools and teachers are nervous about AI, and honestly I get it — the fear of cheating is real, and so is the worry that children will stop thinking for themselves. But the answer isn't to ban it. The answer is to teach the right way to use it: not as a *magic eight-ball* ("will it rain tomorrow?") but as a coach, a debate partner, a research assistant, and a launchpad for real learning.

Why I encourage my own children to use AI

I let my two girls use AI — in a controlled way, with conversations, with rules, with curiosity. Because the truth is uncomfortable but simple: in their working lives they will either be replaced by some form of AI, or they will be the ones who understand it and use it well. Future employers will assume fluency. I want my girls on the right side of that line. And until the classic school curriculum catches up — which will take years — that responsibility falls largely on parents.

Some premium schools already offer coding clubs, AI workshops, game design and robotics. Most schools don't, and most families can't afford the ones that do. That gap shouldn't decide a child's future.

One programme. Every major AI tool.

The AI market is flooded — new tools every week. I'm not here to teach one product. I teach the fundamentals that work across all of them: ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, DeepSeek and whatever comes next. It's about how to think with AI, not which logo to click.

We are witnessing the beginning

One thing is certain: this is the beginning. We are watching the birth and rapid growth of AI, and eventually *AGI* (artificial general intelligence — AI that can reason across any task as well as a human). Can you imagine the world our children will graduate into in five or ten years?

That's why FITinAI exists — and it's free. It's for parents and guardians who want to learn alongside their children, and for any adult who quietly wants to understand this for themselves too.