Automate the Admin, Not the Relationship
AI has no values of its own. It is an amplifier of intent, and the only question that matters is what you point it at.
There is a lot of pressure right now to put AI into everything, and community work is no exception. Every organization I talk to wants to know how AI will transform their community, and most of them are already adding it somewhere, usually a chatbot to answer members or a tool to automate the messages that used to be written by a person. I build with AI every day, so I am not here to tell you to slow down. I am here to tell you that most of it is being pointed at exactly the wrong thing.
The thing to understand about AI is that it has no values of its own. It is an amplifier of intent, which means it takes whatever you aim it at and makes more of it, faster. Point it at throughput and it will give you more throughput, more messages, more automation and more reach, whether or not any of that was ever the point. Point it at relationships and it can deepen them in ways that were never possible by hand.
I have spent years building the systems underneath communities, the data engines and the automations that keep a hub like Hub71 or a campus like Yas Creative Hub running, and more recently building Swaplyst, a product whose entire job is using AI to connect people to each other.