I spent this week watching kids build things that I could not build.
One of them built a multiplayer game with actual rooms that you join with a code, so you can send the code to your friend and battle each other across multiple levels. He embedded different background music for each stage, because he decided the music should get more intense as the game got harder. And at the end of it all, they battled THE BOSS.
Another kid built a study buddy which uses AI to track his studying and mark his work. It gamifies his revision, so if he puts in enough hours he unlocks special powers to level up his player character. He also added a parent mode, so his mum can log in and see what he's been working on, how long he's been on the screen, and how his studying is actually going.
All of that, in just three mornings.
They built more than an adult would have
I don't think an adult would have made either of those in three days. Not because adults are less capable - on paper we are far more capable - but because an adult would have spent the first morning deciding what was realistic.
Multiplayer with room codes? Too complicated, let's do two players on one screen. Different music for every level? Nice, park it for version two. Parent mode? Maybe if there's time.
The kids didn't do any of that. Nobody had told them room codes were hard, so room codes weren't hard. They described the game they saw in their heads and kept going until the screen matched.
That's the part people miss about AI. We talk about it as a productivity tool - the same work, done faster. But for these kids it was the first time the distance between "what I imagined" and "what I can actually make" was short enough to walk across.
This brings me to a number I read this week
Dell published a study on Singapore last week, and one line in it stopped me. 79% of companies here say they will not move ahead with a new AI initiative without proven business outcomes and a defined risk management plan. The rest of the study is in the same direction. 58% say they cannot keep pace with the speed of change. 60% don't have an actionable roadmap across AI, data and security.
After spending this week with the kids I think I've figured out why.
Adults have so much to unlearn before we can learn. Twenty years in finance taught me how things should be done - this was enormously useful right up until now. We carry around assumptions about what costs too much, what needs a specialist, what takes two quarters, what isn't worth attempting. Most of these were true but we are now in a totally new technological landscape with the advancement of AI.
I think that's what "cannot keep pace" really means. It isn't that adults can't learn AI. It's that we have to clear something out before we can, and clearing out is much slower than filling up.
Kids have nothing to clear out. They're a blank slate. They haven't been put in the box yet.
So the generation that will pick this up fastest, most naturally, with the least resistance, are our children.
So why don't we let them begin
We are spending an enormous amount of energy helping adults catch up. Reskilling programmes, subsidised courses, compulsory modules at university. All of it necessary, and all of it aimed at people who first have to unlearn a decade of habits.
Meanwhile the ones with nothing to unlearn are being told to wait. Primary school is too early, wait until secondary school. Wait till there is more governance and it is proven, wait until it turns up on a syllabus.
Let me be clear, I am not saying hand your nine-year-old a laptop and an AI account and leave them to it. Definitely not. Left alone, these tools will quite happily do a child's thinking for them and a kid who learns that AI is a shortcut has picked up a habit that's hard to unpick later.
However, what our children need is what we give them with everything else that matters. Swimming. Cycling. Crossing the road. They need someone beside them, asking them why they chose to build what they built, whether they believed the answer AI gave them and to guide them to figure out how to fix the bugs they found while building.
That is why I am so particular about how we run our camps. At dreambuilders.sg we will guide your children the same way we would guide our very own. We will inspire them, challenge them and more importantly, raise their confidence in knowing that their dreams are important and they are not out of reach.
Our kids are ready now. Let's build with them.