Could AI ironically make membership more human? 

AI's biggest contribution to member engagement might not be what it does for your members, but what it frees membership professionals to do with them. 

There is a slightly strange thing happening as AI gets better at doing more of the things that membership organisations have traditionally spent a great deal of time doing.

The easier it becomes to produce content, answer questions, summarise complex information, automate communications and personalise digital experiences, the more valuable some decidedly human things may become: a conversation with somebody who genuinely understands your industry, a trusted recommendation rather than another search result, an introduction to exactly the right person, or walking into a room and discovering that another organisation is wrestling with precisely the same challenge as yours.

In other words, the more technology we have at our disposal, the more valuable genuine human connection could become.

Memcom recently explored a similar idea in relation to events, looking at why face-to-face experiences could become even more important in an AI era, particularly when it comes to creating trust and demonstrating genuine member value.

But perhaps the idea goes much further than events.

What if information isn't the product anymore?

Information has been an important part of the membership proposition for a very long time, whether through guidance, research, newsletters, regulatory updates, reports, webinars, toolkits or the wealth of specialist knowledge that many membership organisations hold on behalf of their professions and industries.

That information isn't suddenly becoming unimportant, but the environment around it is changing remarkably quickly.

An individual member or a member organisation can now ask an AI tool a relatively complicated question and receive a reasonably sophisticated answer in seconds, while the amount of content being produced across almost every sector continues to grow at a pace that no member could realistically consume.

So perhaps the value is beginning to shift.

If information itself becomes abundant, knowing which information matters, what it means, whether it can be trusted and what somebody should actually do with it becomes considerably more valuable.

A trade association doesn't simply need to tell a member business that a regulation has changed, because increasingly that information can be found elsewhere; its real value may be in understanding what that change means for organisations operating within that particular industry, where the risks and opportunities sit and what other businesses are doing in response.

Similarly, a professional body isn't valuable simply because it can provide information about a profession, but because it can establish standards, create recognition, connect people, provide trusted expertise and help individuals navigate their careers in ways that a generic source of information cannot easily replicate.

The same applies to membership teams themselves, because the best people aren't simply distributing communications or answering enquiries; they are listening, noticing patterns, understanding what individual and organisational members are concerned about and, sometimes, spotting what is likely to matter before it has even started appearing clearly in the data.

And that requires something technology cannot simply manufacture overnight: really good membership people.

Your people could become an even bigger part of your member proposition

For years, membership organisations have understandably invested heavily in CRM systems, websites, digital platforms, automation, online communities and increasingly sophisticated member journeys, and those investments remain hugely important because members quite rightly expect their digital experiences to be easy, relevant and useful.

But as those technologies become more capable and increasingly accessible to everyone, there is another question worth asking: are the human skills sitting around those systems actually becoming more important rather than less?

The differentiator may increasingly be whether your people can listen properly and build genuine relationships, whether they can take something complicated and make it useful, connect one member organisation with another that can help, understand the nuances of an industry or profession, challenge somebody constructively when necessary and recognise the difference between what a member is asking for and what they actually need.

It is also about whether your people can make an individual, business or organisation feel that being part of your membership gives them access to expertise, relationships and understanding they simply wouldn't have on their own.

Those abilities can sometimes get bundled together as "soft skills", but that description increasingly feels inadequate because, in a membership organisation, they may actually be part of the product.

AI could change what brilliant membership talent looks like

None of this means membership organisations should become nostalgic for the days before automation or resist the opportunities presented by AI.

Quite the opposite, because the strongest future membership professionals may well be those who are extremely comfortable with technology and exceptionally good with people, which means developing those capabilities within existing teams could become just as important as recruiting them.

AI literacy is unlikely to remain a specialist skill that sits with one person or one department. As these tools become embedded into communications, membership, events, policy, operations, finance and leadership, organisations may need to think much more deliberately about upskilling their people to use AI confidently, intelligently and responsibly, rather than assuming everyone will simply pick it up as they go along.

And that doesn't mean turning membership professionals into technologists. It means helping people understand what AI is good at, where it can genuinely improve their work, where human judgement still matters and, crucially, how they can use the time it gives back to do more of the things that create genuine member value.

Imagine somebody who can use AI to remove several hours of administration from their week and deliberately spend some of that reclaimed time talking to members, or somebody who can interrogate member data intelligently but also recognise the human story behind what the numbers are showing them.

It could be someone who knows which routine communications should be automated while understanding when an interaction absolutely shouldn't be, or somebody commercially minded enough to think seriously about member value while remaining curious enough to keep asking individual and organisational members what value actually means to them.

That creates an interesting question for membership leaders: are you recruiting for the skills you need today, or developing the membership talent you'll need tomorrow?

Because some of that future talent may already be sitting within your organisation.

The membership executive who is naturally curious about AI, the events professional experimenting with new technology, the membership manager who understands data better than their job description suggests or the communications professional beginning to use AI to work differently could all be developing capabilities that become considerably more valuable over the next few years.

Giving emerging talent the opportunity to experiment, learn and upskill in AI alongside developing the human capabilities that technology cannot easily replicate could therefore become an increasingly important part of workforce and succession planning.

The brilliant membership professional of the future may not necessarily be the person who knows the most, because technology is making knowledge increasingly accessible; it could be the person who is particularly good at interpreting, connecting, questioning and communicating, while knowing how to use AI to make all of those things more effective.

Don't automate the bits your members actually love

Perhaps one of the most useful exercises a membership organisation could do right now is ask a deceptively simple question:

Which parts of our membership experience would members genuinely miss if there were no human involved?

For one organisation, it might be the account manager who knows a member business and understands the history of the relationship, while for another it could be the expert at the end of the phone who can explain what a new piece of regulation really means in practice.

It could be the introduction made at an event that leads to a valuable partnership, the committee where competitors temporarily become collaborators because their industry has a shared problem to solve, or the member of staff who remembers a conversation from six months ago and follows up because something relevant has happened.

It might even be the ability to phone someone who can say, technically that's correct, but here's what we're actually seeing across the sector.

Those moments can be difficult to put neatly onto a dashboard and they don't always generate an immediate click, conversion or easily measurable engagement statistic, but they can create enormous value and, importantly, can be extraordinarily difficult for another organisation to replicate.

Perhaps the future isn't digital versus human at all

Memcom has also been exploring the psychology of membership, including the importance of purpose, belonging and perceived value, and there is something particularly interesting about considering those ideas alongside the rapid development of AI.

The question for membership organisations isn't whether they should embrace AI and automation, because there are already countless ways in which those technologies can make organisations faster, smarter and more useful to their members.

The more interesting question might be what they choose to do with the human capacity that technology gives back to them.

If AI eventually removes five hours of administration from somebody's working week, filling those five hours with another five hours of administration would be a spectacular missed opportunity. What if some of that capacity went back into understanding members better, building relationships, connecting businesses and professionals, spotting opportunities, strengthening communities, developing new propositions and simply being available when somebody needs another human being who genuinely understands their world?

There is an important talent question wrapped up in all of this too, because if membership organisations want to become more human as their technology becomes more sophisticated, they need to think carefully about whether they are developing their existing people, upskilling them in AI and creating opportunities for emerging membership talent to grow into the capabilities the sector will need next.

The skills mix may look quite different from the one organisations recruited for five or ten years ago, combining AI confidence, data literacy, commercial thinking and adaptability with distinctly human capabilities such as judgement, empathy, communication, curiosity and relationship building.

And perhaps that is one of the more positive ways to look at AI. Rather than asking only which jobs will it change or replace, membership organisations can ask a much more useful question:

What could our people become better at because they have it?

Because in a future where almost every organisation has access to remarkably similar technology, the technology itself may not be what makes your membership organisation distinctive at all.

The people you invest in, the future talent you develop and the way they use that technology just might.