![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/2279263fb9da9d53e9e9262171cf9783f0-amish-ai.rsquare.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty\n <\/p>\n
It\u2019s Sunday afternoon in the heart of Ohio Amish country, and after driving their horse and buggy home from church, the Wengerd family is teasing Dad about the time Mom caught him using an AI chatbot to write her a Valentine.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re all sitting in their farmhouse\u2019s living room, which contains zero TVs but lots of comfortable chairs. Valentine\u2019s Day was weeks ago, yet Mary Ellen Wengerd is still tickled about the love note her husband, Daniel, co-authored with generative AI. \u201c\u200aIt was so eloquently written,\u201d she says, biting back a grin. \u201cReading this, I was like, This is so not my husband.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary Ellen wears a white bonnetlike cap over her hair and the ankle-length dress she\u2019d put on for church. She\u2019s curled into an overstuffed armchair alongside the youngest of their six children, Jethro, 7, who\u2019s parked his feet on her lap. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018Did you write this?\u2019\u201d Mary Ellen says, looking at Daniel.\u00a0\u201c\u2018Or did you ask ChatGPT to put a little love letter together?\u2019 And he was like, \u2018Ummm \u2014\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI actually did!\u201d\u00a0Daniel says as laughter erupts in the room. \u201cBut I made a couple changes!\u201d We seem to be on well-trod comedic ground. Daniel\u2019s blushing on the couch opposite Mary Ellen, stroking his wavy gray beard. Daniel points at me, the writer visiting from New York, in the corner. \u201cRead it to him,\u201d he says, \u201cand then tell him what doesn\u2019t sound like me.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Mary Ellen reads aloud and ribs Daniel about the fancy phrasing, she still sounds touched by the note. \u201cI know the intent was right,\u201d she tells me.\u00a0\u201cHe\u2019s on a tight schedule, and I imagine he got into a pinch.\u201d The new AI wingman offering to help those in a pinch \u2014 whether writing love notes or code \u2014 is finding a toehold in Amish country. Holmes County, Ohio, has the highest concentration of Amish people of any county in the U.S. Visitors expecting to see traditional horses and buggies, bonnets and Abe Lincoln beards, won\u2019t be disappointed. Still, they\u2019ll find Amish entrepreneurs plugging into the digital economy and one clan of early adopters weaving generative AI into their knowledge work without much hesitation.<\/p>\n
Of course, none of this sounds like the tech-shy Amish life in the popular imagination. However, there\u2019s no such thing as a single Amish approach to technology. There are some 2,600 Amish churches across the country, and each makes its own, separate decisions about what sorts of new hardware and software church members can use. The Wengerd\u2019s church is Old Order Amish. Its married members dress plainly, don\u2019t drive cars or own TVs, and don\u2019t connect their homes to the electrical grid. They speak a dialect of German at home and at church \u2014 which Daniel\u2019s eldest son kindly translated for me during the service I attended.<\/p>\n
Daniel is a minister in his church and has played a role in the congregation\u2019s collective decisions to interdict smartphones and social media but to allow e-bikes, flip phones, solar-generated electricity, and religiously curated internet access. \u201cI don\u2019t want to paint a picture that we\u2019re pushing for new technology and we don\u2019t have respect for our traditions and our values,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWe\u2019re not just opening the door to anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the 400,000 Amish people nationwide, there\u2019s no one tracking how many are using AI. Historian Marcus Yoder estimates that less than half of the Amish people in Holmes County have internet access and, among them, fewer than 10 percent have tried generative AI. But Yoder, who runs the Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center in Millersburg, Ohio, adds, \u201cMy Amish employees do use it here.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sociologist Steven Nolt, a leading scholar of Amish life, says an unusually high percentage of Amish men in Holmes County work in manufacturing \u2014 almost half \u2014 making the place a more likely hot spot for tech experimentation. \u201cThese things are governed by tradition,\u201d Nolt tells me. \u201cAnd there\u2019s no 95-year-old grandmother who can tell you the Amish way to use computers in your manufacturing establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel Wengerd runs a manufacturing company in the heart of Holmes County. His father founded the business in the 1970s, welding together horse-drawn plows for local farmers, and today, its 55 employees do millions in yearly sales with customers ranging from small wagonmakers to huge data centers. \u201cWith the Wengerds, they are typical in that they\u2019re illustrating this process of experimentation,\u201d Nolt says. \u201cThey\u2019re atypical in that they have a large and sophisticated company.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel, 45, tells me he sees AI as just another labor-saving tool that might seem a little uncanny at first \u2014 until it becomes essential. Take the mechanical reaper, he says, invented in the 19th century to do the work of ten men, cutting wheat stalks, bundling them together, then knotting them with twine. \u201c\u200aWhen that machine first came out, there was Amish people who were convinced that the devil is in that knotter,\u201d Daniel says.\u00a0\u201cA lot of what I see in that is there\u2019s a fear of the unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n
As members of a community that has already erected elaborate guardrails around the internet and computers, the early adopters trying out ChatGPT and CoPilot don\u2019t exhibit much fear.\u00a0As far as I can tell, they see generative AI as just another thing computers do. \u201cA computer\u2019s a machine that you tell to do the right thing,\u201d Daniel tells me. \u201cWe just have a better way to tell it to do the right thing than in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI use it every day,\u201d says Daniel\u2019s son Brian, 21, who this year became VP of operations for the family business. Around the time ChatGPT first came out, Brian had just worked his way off the factory floor into a customer-facing design role. Weeks into the new job, he had to write a tough email, updating a client on an order while firmly demanding detailed input to keep work on schedule. New to high-stakes client communications, Brian asked himself, \u201cHey, I wonder if Chat can help me with this?\u201d<\/p>\n
ChatGPT nailed the message, and soon Brian found lots more work for it to do. Brian opens his work laptop to show me the software that tracks the company\u2019s sales, finance, and production workflows. You can buy commercial tracking platforms like this off the shelf, but Brian says none of them have the interactive dashboard that he\u2019s demonstrating to me \u2014 a new feature he says powered the company\u2019s highest-production month ever in February.\u00a0As he clicks, colorful pie charts bloom onscreen to display real-time production capacity for every department in the factory. I\u2019m barely following, but Brian\u2019s proud of these pie charts \u2014 because he and a couple other guys at work coded this dashboard themselves. Or, I should say, vibe-coded it. \u201cProbably 80 percent was from ChatGPT,\u201d Brian says.<\/p>\n
Not all the AI power users in Holmes County have office jobs. Brian\u2019s cousin John, 19, works at an animal-feed store and runs side-hustles selling chickens and managing property bought with the proceeds. When a potential buyer for one property requested a rent-to-own arrangement, John researched the details with ChatGPT and asked the chatbot to draft a contract. Just to be sure, John says, \u201cI sent it to an attorney, and he said he had nothing to change.\u201d<\/p>\n
John\u2019s brother, Lewis Wengerd, 21, works for a concrete contractor who tasked him with researching an excavating machine the company wanted to buy. \u201cAt the moment, I didn\u2019t have good access to a computer,\u201d Lewis tells me. \u201cSo I called the number from my flip phone.\u201d<\/p>\n
I must seem confused, so Lewis tries to explain. \u201cI run a Sunbeam F1 Pro Spruce,\u201d he says, indicating his device, marketed as a \u201crugged dumb phone,\u201d because his church bans the smart variety. That isn\u2019t news to me, I say, but I confess I\u2019d never heard of 1-800-ChatGPT, let alone dialed the number. \u201cHave you never done?\u201d Lewis says, laughing. \u201cYou ought to try it. It\u2019s pretty neat.\u201d (I did try calling 1-800-ChatGPT later. The female voice that answered\u00a0\u2014 millennially lifelike down to the touch of vocal fry \u2014 responded to my questions until I felt slightly spooked and hung up.)<\/p>\n
The guiding principle on new technologies, Daniel says, \u201cis always that it doesn\u2019t take away from what we experienced today.\u201d The day he invited me over, our experience above all prioritized worshiping together and spending as much face-to-face time as possible with a community of close-knit families.<\/p>\n
Raising these families takes resources, and over the last generation or so, economic necessity has pushed most Amish breadwinners off the farm. Steven Nolt, the sociologist, has chronicled the problems faced by an agrarian people raising huge families in a country paving its farmland over for suburbs.\u00a0\u201cEven if development had been frozen,\u201d Nolt writes in a book he co-authored, \u201cthe growth of the population itself would have created a crisis with too many babies and too few farms.\u201d For nearly all the Amish people I meet in Holmes County, agriculture is a side job, and their actual living comes from working for or running small businesses. Staying competitive means adapting to the digital economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur very specific geographical area has quite a few complex businesses,\u201d says Ian Wengerd, 39-year-old father of six who wears the traditional Amish beard and trousers but at work favors polo shirts featuring his company logo. Just across the road from his cousin Daniel\u2019s factory, Ian runs a 30-employee metal-fabrication shop specializing in structural beams, stairways, and railings. The company has a slick website, and Ian and I speak via a Google video call. Like almost everyone else in the Wengerds\u2019 church, Ian pays for a Christian-run service that installs an app on all company devices blocking access to social media, sexual content, and anything else the church deems inappropriate.<\/p>\n
The shop\u2019s technological evolution helped me understand why he and the rest of the Wengerd clan seem so nonchalantly all in on generative AI. \u201cWe get involved in some state work, federal work, private work,\u201d Ian says. \u201cFor us to try to do business with just a fax machine and a voice-mail, I mean I\u2019d have to shut my doors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ian\u2019s father started out hand-welding steel railings in a converted calf barn, he says, but as sales took off, they couldn\u2019t keep doing their books by hand. So in 2015 the company bought its first computer to run some accounting software. Email and onternet arrived at the office in 2017. That same year, a contract came in for a big commercial job that required submitting plans drawn with computer-aided-design software, and so, Ian says, \u201cI taught myself at night how to do CAD when I should have been sleeping.\u201d<\/p>\n
After ChatGPT\u2019s release, Ian began staying up nights learning about generative AI. \u201cI started using it soon after it came out, more or less testing it,\u201d Ian says. \u201cThe more I used it, the more I thought this could actually be a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s good for shortening emails Ian sends to clients; good for finding weak clauses in 200-page subcontractor agreements; and even good for planning out meals for his family, which has been on a health kick recently. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to eat whole foods, right?\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019ll spit out the recipes and \u2026boom, we\u2019re ready to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ian\u2019s not too worried about LLMs hallucinating false answers.\u00a0For his purposes, Ian says he knows enough about the material at hand to spot mistakes. On smaller contracts, for example, he double-checks the AI\u2019s work himself. \u201cOnce it gets over a million dollars,\u201d he says, \u201cI bring in an attorney.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the people I spoke with, all the headlines about the job-killing, attention-sucking, corner-cutting downsides of generative AI aren\u2019t sparking panic. It\u2019s early days, so perhaps these problems are yet to arrive. But so far, the Wengerds have managed to fence those hazards out.<\/p>\n
John Wengerd, the chicken-selling property manager, doesn\u2019t see much risk in falling down rabbit holes texting with his chatbot. Like everyone else I spoke with, John has no smartphone and his internet access is both filtered and mostly available at work. \u201cI can\u2019t lay in bed for half an hour asking Chat stuff. So the times when I\u2019m vulnerable it\u2019s not at my fingertips,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I go home, I\u2019m riding a horse or feeding chickens.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty It\u2019s Sunday afternoon in the heart of Ohio Amish country, and after driving their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[27486,25,27487,580,157,27485],"class_list":["post-45211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-amish","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-audio-article","tag-chatgpt","tag-openai","tag-tomorrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}