Retired Vietnamese entrepreneur turns to AI to manage life alone in the countryside

Retiring after three decades as an entrepreneur, Nguyen Van Anh relocated to the outskirts of Hanoi to live independently, enlisting artificial intelligence to manage her health and personal finances.

On a crisp autumn morning in Ha Bang, a countryside commune, the 63-year-old chats with her gardener while tapping away on an AI application on her phone. Opening her health bot, she uploads snapshots of her sleep metrics and workout records from the previous day. The software flags that her rest had fallen short, suggesting she should swap her scheduled afternoon weightlifting session for gentle muscle stretching.

Reviewing the feedback on screen, Van Anh decides to extend her midday nap.

"Instead of relying on administrative staff like in the past, I now employ artificial intelligence as personal assistants for my retirement," the founder of the Center for Studies and Applied Sciences in Gender, Family, Women and Adolescents (CSAGA) says.

Over the past year, she has abandoned her long habit of driving 30 kilometers into the city center each morning. Following two consecutive health scares, she stepped away from day-to-day operational leadership, choosing instead to supervise CSAGA initiatives remotely while running corporate workshops on workplace gender equality.

The countryside retreat in Ha Bang was a shared vision designed with her late husband.

After his passing, she chose to live there by herself rather than move in with her adult children. To manage daily life on her own, she has systematically swapped physical chores for automated appliances. Her housekeeper comes in only on schedule for an hour to clean, while all kitchen duties are handled by an automated multi-cooker.

Whenever friends drop by, she simply loads the ingredients into the appliance, hits the program settings, and let the machine serve complete meals.

"My living philosophy is natural wilderness on the outside, modern technology on the inside," she says.

"Preparing meals is no longer an issue when smart devices handle the workload".

In the early days of retirement, she struggled to organize her personal records. Unfamiliar with spreadsheet software like Excel, she turned to conversational AI instead.

She categorized her daily routines into separate operational buckets, training tailored chatbots for specific roles such as health, personal finance, asset management, creative writing, and travel planning.

In the "health" category, she logs her daily nutritional intake and training sessions. Whenever she considers a dietary supplement, she snaps a picture of the ingredient label for the model to review. On one occasion, she considered taking fo-ti root extract, a traditional medicinal herb, but abandoned the idea when the bot warned of potential liver toxicity when combined with her prescribed medications.

She regularly brings these AI-generated breakdowns along as reference notes to consultations with doctors.

"I no longer push myself through grueling gym workouts; instead, I focus on targeted functional strength, loading up on leafy greens and lean poultry or fish," she says.

By keeping close tabs on her biometric data, she trimmed her weight down from 63 kilograms to 54.

For her personal finances, she inputs monthly revenue and expenses into the chatbot to generate structured budget forecasts.

The virtual assistant functions as an in-house accountant, evaluating cash flows while offering spending recommendations. The system also provides daily market updates and breaks down regulatory developments affecting personal real estate holdings.

To turn the property into an income-generating asset, she converted an auxiliary house into a countryside guesthouse. Guest bookings climbed noticeably after she began leaning on AI to draft marketing copy for social media campaigns.

In her writing projects, AI acts as a manuscript editor for her two forthcoming books, offering line edits that included trimming negative phrasing by 20% while elevating motivating language by 40%.

She also relies on virtual assistants to generate visual illustrations for digital posts and draft multi-day travel itineraries.

"My guiding rule with artificial intelligence is that the supervisor must always remain smarter than the assistant," she says. "Never treat AI like a magical genie; it is simply a hard-working assistant".

She regularly gets questions from acquaintances after moving out to the countryside on her own about where she gets access to basic utilities, who she calls during a medical emergency, and whether she fears burglars and venomous snakes.

Her replies: "My community is now the surrounding trees and resident animals. When all living things share the space, you can never truly call it living alone".

Upkeep around the grounds constantly keeps her busy, whether lopping off dry branches, trimming tree lines, clearing overgrown perimeter fences, or tending to her dogs, chickens, and cats.

Over 60 jackfruit trees ripen together in season, star apple orchards yield 200 to 300 fruits per harvest, and starfruit boughs hang heavy under their crop. After picking a full basket of guavas recently, she ate just one and tossed the rest into the pond fish and across the grounds for birds.

Over the years, the wooded garden has become a sanctuary for sunbirds, kingfishers, magpie-robins, and even a solitary waterhen foraging along the clearings.

Her daily routine begins at 4 a.m. with an hour of quiet meditation followed by 90 minutes of qigong breathing exercises.

Once morning chores are done, she practices English, reads books, and handles remote administrative work.

Afternoons are reserved for dumbbell sessions and resistance band routines, and she goes to bed not later than 9:00 p.m.

Regular physical conditioning alongside structured AI tracking helped her bounce back from serious medical conditions, building the stamina required to trek through Son Doong Cave in 2016, drive across China in 2025, and do a 21-kilometer trail runs across the highlands of Mu Cang Chai, Moc Chau, and Sapa.

In her sixties now, she continues to map out new road-running routes and prepare for upcoming overland expeditions.

"I know this lifestyle is not for everyone," she says. "The secret lies in knowing what habits to keep and what burdens to set aside to safeguard health and personal independence at this stage in life".