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If the last few months have taught us anything, the future of AI is developing quickly and its implication on associations cannot be understated. From new tools and applications staff can use to streamline work, to chatbots and content summarizers your members can use to interact with your organization.
And while your association doesn't need to immediately become AI-native, at the very least you should know how the technology works, ways your staff can use it, and more importantly, how it can change the way your members interact with you.
The 3 Key Takeaways Associations Should Consider
In our Generative AI for Associations webinar, we explored many of these topics with insights from Amith Nagarajan, Founder and Chairman of Blue Cypress, Dray McFarlane, Co-Founder of Tasio and Reggie Henry, Chief Information and Performance Excellence Officer at ASAE.
While there’s plenty associations need to consider before exploring AI, here are a few takeaways to help you get started.
1. Embracing generative AI is crucial to stay relevant and meet members' expectations
As generative AI becomes more accessible and powerful, associations must adapt and use this technology to maintain their relevance and cater to their members' expectations.
Reggie Henry emphasized the importance of embracing AI, saying, “Your members are going to demand this stuff from you. They are expecting to interact with you the way they interact with everyone else, which is going to be conversational, deeply personalized and engaging.”
Amith Nagarajan added that there will be two categories of organizations in the future: AI-native and those that are becoming irrelevant. Because these tools will become commonplace for your members, associations need to start educating themselves to stay ahead.
How to Talk to Your Members About AI
When it comes to integrating AI in your association, knowing how to talk to your members is key. Here's a guide to help you get started!
2. Generative AI can help manage and make sense of an association's vast content
Associations often struggle with organizing and managing vast repositories of content. From blog posts and journal articles to conference recordings and webinars.
Generative AI can help by providing content summaries and descriptions, making it more accessible and easier to organize.
Dray McFarlane explained, “these tools are able to be trained on your data...the key here is not just that these tools are becoming more available, but it allows your association to be more a part of people's lives.”
Henry also emphasized the potential for AI to help manage biases in content, saying, “there's bias in everything, folks. And one of the things that we might need to do...is consider how do we manage bias?” By using generative AI to analyze and organize content, associations can better address biases and ensure their content is more inclusive and relevant.
3. Generative AI allows for more personalized and interactive content for members
For associations, member experience is key to retention. While you can leverage staff to do so, generative AI tools allow organizations to create more personalized and interactive content for their members. Not only does it help boost engagement, but also it fosters more meaningful experiences with their membership.
During the session, Betty Bot – a chatbot designed specifically for associations – showcased how chatbots could be trained on an association's knowledge and provide real-time, conversational assistance to members. According to Nagarajan, this approach enables associations to “provide so much incremental value to the member that the member is basically joined at the hip.”
Beyond that, the speakers explained how generative AI can help create personalized marketing campaigns, tailoring content to individual members based on their interests and interactions with the association.
Integrating AI Into Your Association
Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize not just associations but the world. And while there are more questions than answers today, waiting for those to be solved is not the right call.
Because your members are already using these tools, their expectations are changing. When their baseline experience becomes quick answers from ChatGPT and curated content based on their search history, struggling to find what they need on your association’s site quickly becomes an issue.
As Nagarajan says, “Generative AI, and AI broadly, is different. It's not a step change. It's an order of magnitude change in capability and opportunity.”
Partially written using Writer’s Recaps Builder tool.
