By Jonathan Chevreau on June 12, 2026 Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Is AI the ultimate retirement hack?

By Jonathan Chevreau on June 12, 2026 Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Artificial intelligence is best at overcoming the friction that stops you from taking up new pursuits, users insist.

There’s an interesting new book just published called I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything. The author is Joanna Stern, who was a personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal for 12 years. As the subtitle of her book reveals, she spent a year using artificial intelligence (AI) for almost every conceivable task in her daily life, which included a job, raising a family, and writing the book.

The book—described in Stern’s site as an “instant NYT bestseller”—inspired me to reach out on LinkedIn and Featured.com to see whether retirees could benefit from some of these ideas, both financially in order to get to retirement in the first place and, once there, to discover how AI might be used to spend the resulting leisure time that accrues to retirees. I know plenty of retired or semi-retired friends who are writing books, playing around with AI music or art, and other creative pursuits assisted by AI tools like Chat GPT, Grok, or Claude.

While my family members dabble in some of these tools, I confess I’ve not yet immersed myself in them, although I find AI to be an interesting theme as an investment, if only through an exchange-traded fund like AIS, the VistaShares Artificial Intelligence Supercycle ETF. (Its top holdings are the usual tech/semiconductor suspects: Nvidia, Micron, Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor, AMD, SK Hynix, GE Vernova, and another 50 or so names.)

Stern’s book came to my attention via an interview with Jim Cramer in his Mad Money podcast. Cramer himself appears to be immersed in every AI tool from Claude to Google’s Gemini.

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Stern certainly doesn’t think every AI app is worth the bother or expense (they’re not necessarily free even if, as in the drug world, the first hit is free). If you’re still in the workforce or a young person just getting started, there’s little doubt you’ll have little choice but to embrace this technology. As Nvidia........

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