When AI becomes part of the team in the membership sector. 

When we say AI Manager, we don't necessarily mean somebody sitting at the head of a newly created AI department. We mean something potentially much more significant: a manager or leader whose role increasingly involves overseeing work carried out by both people and AI.

It could be a Membership Director who manages a team of people alongside a growing collection of AI tools and agents, a Head of Communications who decides which work should be created by people, which can be accelerated by AI and where human judgement absolutely has to remain, or a Policy Director who uses AI to monitor developments and interrogate information but knows when context, political instinct and experience matter more than the output on screen.

It could equally be a CEO who needs to understand not simply how to use AI, but how to lead an organisation in which AI is increasingly becoming part of how work gets done.

That future is no longer particularly far away.

Government-commissioned research into the UK AI labour market found that 57% of respondents plan to adopt agentic AI within the next three years. At the same time, 97% identified at least one AI skills gap, while senior AI positions were highlighted as particularly difficult to recruit.

For membership organisations, this raises a much bigger question:

Are we preparing people to use AI, or are we preparing them to manage a workforce in which AI becomes part of the team?

From using AI to managing AI

For the past few years, much of the workplace AI conversation has focused on tools. Can your team use ChatGPT effectively? Can AI help create member communications, analyse survey responses, interrogate data or improve productivity?

Those questions still matter, but the next stage of AI adoption is likely to require something different.

As AI agents become capable of carrying out increasingly complex sequences of work, people will need to know how to delegate to them, supervise them, challenge their outputs and, crucially, take responsibility for the work they produce.

Imagine, for example, a future Head of Membership. Alongside managing their membership executives, they may also oversee AI supported renewal journeys, member segmentation, insight and reporting, personalised communications and first line member enquiries.

Their job has not disappeared. In many ways, it may have become more important.

What has changed is the combination of capabilities required to do it brilliantly.

We're already seeing the beginnings of this shift

At Membership Bespoke, one of the most interesting changes we're seeing across the membership sector isn't necessarily organisations suddenly recruiting large numbers of people with "AI" in their job title. The change is more subtle, and potentially much more significant.

The conversation around what makes somebody exceptional in an existing role is beginning to change.

Organisations still need excellent membership professionals, policy specialists, marketers, communicators, finance professionals and leaders, but increasingly the strongest talent will combine that functional expertise with a broader set of future focused capabilities, including:

    • AI Confidence and an understanding of how technology can enhance their role
    • Data Literacy and the ability to turn information into meaningful insight
    • Commercial Thinking and an understanding of organisational value
    • Adaptability as roles, technologies and member expectations continue to evolve
    • Human Judgement to know when technology can help and when experience, empathy and instinct matter more
    • Change Leadership to bring colleagues and teams with them as ways of working evolve

This isn't unique to membership. PwC's 2026 UK AI Jobs Barometer found that demand is being driven particularly by people who can apply AI effectively within an existing field of expertise, rather than purely by demand for AI developers. It also identified growing importance around distinctly human capabilities such as judgement, creativity and leadership.

Indeed's UK hiring data tells a similar story, with 9.4% of UK job postings mentioning AI or related tools by June 2026, and AI related postings growing strongly in areas including HR, management, marketing and finance even while overall hiring in many knowledge work categories remained subdued.

For membership organisations, that distinction matters enormously.

You may not need an "AI person". You may need a brilliant membership person who understands AI.

The job description may be behind the job

This creates an interesting recruitment challenge because, if roles and capabilities are changing faster than traditional organisational structures and job descriptions, recruiting purely against somebody's previous job title or an established list of responsibilities becomes increasingly limiting.

The person who will become an outstanding Head of Membership in three years' time might not look exactly like the conventional Head of Membership candidate today.

The future Policy Director may already be experimenting with AI assisted horizon scanning, while the future Communications Director may be developing new workflows around human and AI generated content, and the future Membership Director may already be combining behavioural insight, data and automation in ways that have not yet appeared in their formal job description.

Some of the most interesting people may not currently be looking for another job at all.

Why passive talent becomes even more important

This is where we think recruitment becomes particularly interesting because, in a changing skills market, relying only on the people actively applying for advertised vacancies risks giving organisations a very narrow view of the talent available to them.

Some of the professionals developing tomorrow's most valuable capabilities are already doing excellent work inside organisations. They are experimenting, adapting, learning and quietly expanding the boundaries of their roles, which means they are not necessarily browsing job boards or actively considering their next move.

That's why access to passive talent is such an important part of how we recruit at Membership Bespoke.

Our relationships across trade associations, professional bodies and the wider membership sector allow us to look beyond who happens to be actively applying and consider a much broader talent pool:

    • Who Is Emerging and beginning to demonstrate capabilities that will become increasingly valuable
    • Who Is Developing Differently and taking their existing role in new directions
    • Who Is Already Doing Tomorrow's Work even if their current job title does not reflect it
    • Who Could Solve Your Next Challenge rather than simply matching the job description you used last time

As roles evolve and skills become harder to define through job titles alone, having visibility of that wider talent market becomes increasingly valuable.

Emerging talent matters too

There is another important side to this conversation because we shouldn't assume that all of tomorrow's AI capability will come from senior or specialist hires. Some of it will come from people entering organisations now and progressing through them over the coming years.

Early career professionals may arrive with very different expectations of technology, different instincts about how work can be done and a much greater expectation that AI will simply form part of their everyday working environment.

For membership organisations, this makes emerging talent, development and succession planning part of the AI conversation too, because building the workforce of the future isn't simply about finding somebody when a vacancy appears. It is about understanding which capabilities will matter, identifying where those capabilities already exist and creating opportunities to develop them.

The question therefore isn't simply:

Who do we need to recruit today?

It is also:

What capabilities do we need to start building now?

AI management could become a leadership competency

Perhaps the most interesting shift is that, eventually, we may stop describing this as an "AI skill" at all.

We don't advertise for leaders or talent who are "email confident", because digital tools have gradually become part of doing the job, and AI may ultimately follow a similar path.

Knowing what to delegate to AI, what to challenge, where human judgement is essential, how to maintain accountability and how to redesign work around new technology could simply become part of being an effective manager and leader.

The organisations that recognise this earliest could have a significant advantage, particularly if they begin thinking about their future skills requirements before those capabilities become difficult and expensive to find.

Because perhaps the most useful workforce question created by AI isn't simply which jobs will disappear?

It is: What will exceptional people be capable of doing that they couldn't do before?

At Membership Bespoke, that's increasingly the question we're interested in for the membership sector. We are looking not only at the roles membership organisations need today, but at the skills, emerging capabilities and talent that will help them succeed tomorrow, whether those people are actively looking, sitting within the sector's passive talent pool or only beginning to emerge.

Because your next great hire may have a familiar job title, but what they are capable of doing with that role could be completely different.