Why AI Certification Matters for Association Leaders

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Dave Will, co-founder and CEO of PropFuel and host of Association Strong, is joined by Jason Oxman, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, and Amith Nagarajan, AAiP, chairman of Blue Cypress and co-founder of Sidecar, to examine the growing importance of AI certification for association leaders. They explore how AI is rapidly moving from experimentation into everyday workflows and why the real risk is not job loss to AI, but falling behind peers who know how to use it effectively. Amith discusses the challenge associations face in keeping pace with AI’s accelerating evolution, while Jason shares ITI’s practical, bottom-up approach to adoption, starting with small use cases such as meeting summaries, email drafting, and research, supported by clear acceptable-use policies and disclosures. The conversation also highlights how AI can strengthen member engagement through personalization, support board and staff education, and enable associations to develop new products and services for their industries.

Check out the video podcast here:

https://youtu.be/Xf3G-LmxEAM

 

Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.

 

Transcript

Dave Will: [00:00:00] Welcome to this month's episode of Associations NOW Presents, an original podcast series from the American Society of Association Executives. I'm Dave Will, co-founder and CEO of Prop Fuel, as well as the host of the Association Strong podcast. If you're listening to this, you'll love the Association Strong podcast.

You can find that at associationstrong.com. Today topic's all about AI certification and whether or not it's a valuable program for association executives. Spoiler, it is. So to dig into this a little further with me, I wanna welcome Jason Oxman, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), and Amith Nagarajan, chairman of Blue Cypress, and the co-founder of Sidecar.

Jason, welcome. 

Jason Oxman: Thanks, Dave. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me on. 

Dave Will: Of course. And Jason, I just learned you are the host of the Download on Tech podcast as well, right? 

Jason Oxman: That is absolutely [00:01:00] right. We focus on public policy related to AI, so a little different than our conversation today, but a great opportunity here.

Conversations about advancements in tech. 

Dave Will: Who doesn't wanna hear more from government officials and Amith you. That was demeaning. I'm very sorry, Jason. I'm sure it's riveting. Talking to the government officials. Amith, welcome to this podcast. So Amith, you have the Sidecar Sync Podcast. 

Amith Nagarajan: I do.

It's a weekly podcast at the intersection of all things associations and artificial intelligence. We love doing it and the association community seems to enjoy it. 

Dave Will: So while we're on Sidecar, Amit, gimme 15 seconds on what Sidecar is all about. 

Amith Nagarajan: Sidecar is on a mission to educate the association world on ai.

It's very simple. We think that the catalyst to driving transformative change in associations is all about education. If we can educate 1 million or more people by the end of the decade, which is our mission at sidecar, [00:02:00] specifically in the association market, we think we're gonna make a big difference.

So our goal is to move the needle considerably on AI adoption, but AI adoption in the pursuit of driving transformational change. 

Dave Will: Was Sidecar originated with that intent or was, did Sidecar more or less embrace AI as it came to the forefront? 

Amith Nagarajan: Sidecar has been around about 10 years. It has not always been exclusively focused on AI, although AI has actually always been on the agenda for sidecar as a major item.

Up until about four years ago, we had a number of other things we covered, but we decided about 2020 1 22 that we were gonna go all in on AI and do nothing. Other than ai. So that's the shift we made. But the broader theme of sidecar is how do we help associations through change, through significant change, of course.

And right now, AI is the biggest driver of that. That may not always be true. And sidecars commitment is to be here for this community. Regardless of what the changing forces are at the moment, it really is about ai. [00:03:00] 

Dave Will: And Jason, before we dig into the AI talk too much, gimme 15 seconds on ITI. Why does ITI exist?

Jason Oxman: We are the oldest and largest trade association of the technology industry. We're founded in 1916 and we represent 80 of the world's largest technology companies, policy development, advocacy around the world, the regulatory and legislative environment obviously impacts the ability of the tech industry to offer innovative services to their customers.

And so the team at ITI, 60 people strong, spends all day every day advocating for public policy that helps advance innovation. Our member companies are all companies you would've heard of ranging from semiconductor manufacturers, data center operators, components manufacturers, big tech companies to the companies advertising in the Super Bowl against each other, the whole tech stack, if you will.

Dave Will: Yeah. Those are entertaining. Uh, the philanthropic and going after, was it Chat GPT, philanthropic going after Chat [00:04:00] GPT for the advertising? Yeah. We could have a whole podcast on advertising and AI. That'd be interesting to talk about. All right. Let's get into the topic, Jason. I've heard that 2026 is the year that AI becomes a productive tool for organizations.

I think what that means is AI has moved from this experimental phase where we're playing with it to making it more deeply ingrained in our operations. And so why the shift? What do you think changed in people's perspective of AI in the last year? 

Jason Oxman: I think what's interesting is AI is a technology tool, and I wanna oversimplify it.

It's software that does a lot of things very well, but it is still a technology tool. So every time we have technology innovation, we have questions about what it means for jobs and the dialogue around AI as a tool. Up until this year has been, I think, a positive and one perhaps driven by [00:05:00] curiosity, what is this gonna mean for my ability to do my job?

And that quickly became, what is this gonna mean for my job? And so if you look back over time, it's interesting to think about. MIT did a study on this last year. 60% of the jobs that people have today did not exist in 1940. Certainly a podcaster is a job that didn't exist in 1940, but overall, 60% of the jobs.

Out there in the country right now did not exist just a few decades ago, and that's because of changes in technology and we all have to adapt to that. I think our conversation today is important because it's a reminder that. My job might not be taken by ai, but it might be taken by somebody who knows how to use ai.

So I think it's more important to figure out how to use the tools to make yourself more marketable as an employee to make your organization more efficient and more effective than it is to view AI as something that's gonna cause. Such disruption that it eliminates jobs entirely. That's why this certification [00:06:00] conversation we're having, this education conversation we're having, particularly for the association community, is so incredibly important.

Dave Will: Did you say when you were introducing ITI, did you say it was 1960? 

Jason Oxman: 1916. So we're 110 years old. Our founding members were companies that made business equipment, so IBM, which used to be called the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, founded us in 1916. Back then, they made punch clocks and scales and adding machines.

NCR. Still with us today, one of our founding members made cash registers. So we used to be called the Association of Business Appliance Manufacturers. And I like the fact that you like old technology too. 

Dave Will: So I just pointed, if you're listening to this, I just pointed at an NCR cash register that's behind me.

I'm very proud of that. Actually, my grandmother was an entrepreneur. She owned a health food shop. When her husband died, she opened a health food shop and she had an NCR and I used to love playing with that. So she gifted it to me when she closed the shop and retired that [00:07:00] 1916. So I think back and at Thanksgiving and the holidays, I have conversations with my father-in-law who was a.

A developer back in the sixties and a developer back in the sixties used punch cards and yeah, it's just fascinating to think about the progress and the change. And so I take it based on what you're saying, you're not too worried about job replacement. Is that a fair summary? 

Jason Oxman: That's a fair summary. I'm not worried about job replacement.

I'm worried about people not recognizing that jobs are changing. 

Dave Will: Changing. 

Jason Oxman: Yep. And the tools that they need to be familiar with in order to adapt are very important to learn. 

Dave Will: Yeah. Amith you've been working in the association space for 25, 30 years. 

Amith Nagarajan: Yeah, it's been a while.

Jason Oxman: Yeah. And the association space is about, people are called associations because we bring people together to associate with one another.

There was this idea that [00:08:00] Zoom, which we're on right now, which is a great platform, and one of our member companies was gonna kill trade shows because people didn't need to travel anymore. But there is no replacement for the in-person contact with one another. The handshake, the eye contact, the conversation.

That's why trade shows continue to thrive, and the association community continues to. To thrive. AI is going to make it easier for us to develop content, to make use of that content, to bring people together, to research, to market all of the things that associations need to do. But it's not gonna replace that in-person contact.

And I think it's the same with jobs. We're gonna make jobs better. We're gonna free up time, be more efficient to do the things that only humans can do, but it's not gonna replace us. 

Dave Will: Yeah, it's not gonna replace my warm embrace when I see you at ASAE this summer. 

Jason Oxman: I look forward to that. Dave 

Dave Will: Amith, in your decades, which, by the way, you look amazing for having spent so many decades working with association. But if in your decades of working [00:09:00] with association you've seen a lot of change, when you first started working with association's, AMS weren't around. You started Aptify back in the day. LMSs weren't around.

I came out with one of the first LMSs back in the early two thousands. The rate of change though, that we're seeing with ai. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before it, it's unbelievable. How do you think the association space is responding or will respond to such dramatically fast change? 

Amith Nagarajan: Honestly, I'm pretty worried about it.

I think the association space is looking at this as another technology for the most part. I do think people are taking it seriously now as we enter 2026, which is great. I don't think they're taking it seriously enough. So I'm probably gonna come across a little bit negative, some of my comments, but I wanted to kind of reassure people that there's time to adapt, but the issue is that the speed at which this technology [00:10:00] is driving change is the problem.

It's not that we're not used to technologies driving change in jobs, and I agree with Jason, that's an excellent stat. 1940 to now 60% of the current jobs didn't exist. That should give us a lot of comfort. On the one hand, the flip side of it is that's 86 years. And the speed at which things are happening now is more like 8.6 months, right?

Is driving radical change. I agree with what Jason's saying that jobs are not likely to completely go away. But first of all, I don't know that any of us really know that to be true or untrue because we've never, none of us have ever been through this type of exponential change. What I will say is these systems that we have, whether they're systems of economy, politics, social systems, there's incentive reward systems in every aspect of life, in business and in personal life.

And the issue is that if you can substitute one product for another or one service for another, and one service is perhaps equivalent in value, but is dramatically less [00:11:00] expensive, or perhaps is even better in value and dramatically less expensive, you will at least seriously consider it, if not flocked to it, right?

It's unlikely that people will hire the jobs. To put it in, in labor economics terms that could be fulfilled by AI or could be 90% fulfilled by AI. So you think about jobs like customer service, a favorite one to pick on and say, is customer service currently being delivered in an extraordinary way universally across all companies everywhere in the globe?

I don't think anyone would say yes to that. That's why I say it in such a ridiculous way. Would most companies say that they love the customer service experience? They provide their own customers or what most associations say, they think the customer service they provide their members is extraordinary.

I don't think most people would agree with that statement. And if they could do that, and it's not about hiring tons more people. Maybe it's about taking the current people they have, but empowering them and that that's exciting. But most of the time when you're talking about like businesses, if you're saying, Hey, we have 5,000 people doing call center work.

I don't know that you're gonna keep 5,000 people. Maybe [00:12:00] not all the jobs go away, but a large number of them could. Now, that doesn't mean that those people can't be retrained. It doesn't mean that all hope is lost for those folks. I'm actually quite optimistic about retraining. I just don't know what those other jobs are yet, and that's what makes me nervous about this sector.

Coming back to it. I think associations have an extraordinarily important responsibility to themselves, internally and to their staff, but moreover to their sector, to their profession. Associations need to lead the way in terms of AI education for everyone, for themselves, and for their industries to help people figure this out, I definitely do not have all the answers.

I just think that the challenge is perhaps the steepest one we've ever faced when it comes to job retraining and readiness. 

Dave Will: So now a big part of that is the mission behind sidecar, and you guys have hands down, in my experience, become the leaders in AI education and now you've partnered up with ASAE there.

You and ASAE are working closely on this association, AI professional certification, otherwise known as [00:13:00] AAiP. If you're on LinkedIn and you're seeing any of your peers, it's unbelievable the number of people that now have AAiP next to their name. Can you walk me through a little bit of this training?

What does it entail? What's involved in the certification education process? 

Amith Nagarajan: I'd love to. The history behind it is we've been providing AI education in one form or another to this market for years, and about a year and a half ago, we decided that we wanted to produce a certification program so that professionals in this market could demonstrate that they have a strong level of competence in both ai, but also association use cases. How do you actually make AI practical for your association, right? Not just understand the theory behind it, but understand how to put it to work for you. And that's what the certification program is all about.

It was we need to teach you the basics so that you understand not just how to prompt ChatGPT. Sure, that's important, but we want you to [00:14:00] understand why certain things work. Why certain things do not work. We want you to be able to adapt and learn over time. So we also update the content extremely frequently.

Like every single month we're updating the content. To answer your question, Dave, we have seven courses that form the foundational layer of the AAiP certification, and those courses cover everything from foundational knowledge of what is AI and how does it work. We try to dispel a number of myths. We also try to provide some fundamental knowledge that we think is important for everyone to have.

Not deeply technical, but it does stretch your mind a little bit. I think in terms of understanding the technology, we want people to not look at it as a magical creature or a black box or something. We want them to have an idea of what's actually happening under the hood. We've touched, I think it's something on, on the order of about 110,000, 120,000 people that we've touched in some way.

Not with the AAiP program yet, that's over a thousand people now. But I'm talking about overall with our webinars, with our podcast, with our newsletters, with all the stuff that we do. We've touched a lot of [00:15:00] people. What we found is that people are both really curious, which is super cool and that the least technical association staff all sometimes are actually the best users of this technology, which I love 'cause that's not true for any other technology I've personally been exposed to.

It's normally the people that are most technically adept and the reason that's the case. Is because AI is so counterintuitive for technologists, right? We're trained to think in these very deterministic ways about how software and technology works, and AI is just this weird thing. It's non-deterministic, right?

It doesn't always produce the same outputs, given the same inputs, and a lot of times people that are more creative, people that have different backgrounds just find their way to getting more use out of it. In any event, the main point of the program is really simple. We want people to, number one, gain those skills and then we want them to have a valuable badge to be able to apply to their names so that they are recognized for their skills, for their knowledge, and for the value they can provide in our organization.

And we were surprised last year when we thought we might have a couple hundred people [00:16:00] get certified, but it blew up. And we love the partnership with ASAE. I've been good friends with. A number of people at ASAE and the organization as a whole since the nineties when they first started using my old company software.

And so I've known them forever and highly respect ASAE. And so partnering with ASAE to broaden the reach of the program is super exciting. So that partnership was launched in the fall and we're out there promoting it together. ASAE members do get a 10% discount. On the program, which is cool, and I can tell you more about it and double click on any of that if you'd like, but it's, we're very excited about it.

Dave Will: A number of my teammates at Prop Fuel have been certified with the AAiP and I'd love to see the rest of my team get certified as well. 

Ad Read: AI is transforming associations, and you can help lead the change at your organization. Through ASAE's partnership with sidecar, A SAE members get discounted access to Sidecar's AI Learning hub, both at the team and individual level.

Whether you're [00:17:00] upskilling your entire team or advancing your own expertise, you'll receive 10% off your subscription and access to the AAiP. Association AI Professional Certification. Get started today at sidecar.ai/asae and bring AI education to your organization today. 

Dave Will: I've been thinking about the evolution of AI usage recently, and I break it down into three tiers, and there's probably gonna be more tiers over time. In fact, I suspect you guys could probably expand on this, but the way I see it is, first it was treated like a fancy Google, one-off questions or help with creating content, writing a blog post, an email, making my email better, more concise.

The next tier is bigger projects that may require an MCP or multiple systems contributing data to do a [00:18:00] better analysis. And usually that's a collection in a multiple exchanges with one or multiples. And then the third tier, and this is the part that I'm most excited about implementing at my company, which is embedding ai.

Into continuous processes. And to me that's the holy grail when you've got it now baked into the way you do things. And I'm sure I could probably continue on. You guys more likely could continue on and say, then it's gonna do this, and then we could do that. But Jason first, someone working inside with that foundation, with somebody working inside an association.

Where does AI fluency. Create the most immediate impact. Is it operations? Is it member engagement, strategy, governance? Like where do you see AI playing the strongest role as the CEO of ITI? 

Jason Oxman: The biggest challenge any [00:19:00] association faces is engaging members, and imagine particularly for professional societies that may have tens or even a hundred thousand plus members.

The biggest use case that I see for AI is. The hyper personalization, if you will, of engagement with members, making sure that you're tailoring and making members aware of the offerings that are tailored for their specific use case. So I do think how members experience associations is what AI can really improve, and that's why it works.

Dave Will: You would think I fed you that answer. Coming from PropFuel, you would think I set that up for you, but it actually wasn't the case. But thank you for that. 

Jason Oxman: It was absolute not the case. 

Dave Will: Totally agree with you. 

Jason Oxman: I'm so glad to hear that. That's how I get invited back as a guest. But I do think that's an important use case.

And I also think it's important for associations to see this as a tool that can. Again, back to your jobs question [00:20:00] earlier, improve the efficiency of the way in which members interact with associations. So if you are in the customer service business and an association and you're getting dozens of inbound inquiries from members a day, you're gonna be able to respond to them more quickly.

You're gonna be able to find the information they're looking for more quickly. You're gonna be able to provide them, in fact. The tools they need to find the information themselves. So I do think there are improvements, as you noted to all of the operations of an association, but I do think that hyper-personalized experience, the one that AI can do better than anything else.

Think about an association like ITI that's 110 years old and think about how much material we have and how much content we've developed over the more than a century, and then think how hard it's to access that. A lot of it historically has been in a box, in a warehouse, but AI can make that all accessible in, in ways that are really useful to uh, members.

So I think that's the best use case for, uh, for associations for ai. And I'm really excited. Let me just say in response to what [00:21:00] ETH was talking about, I'm really excited about the work that he's doing with ASAE's job as an organization. Its whole reason for being. Is to help the association community do business, much as associations themselves, help their members do business.

The technology industry for us, and if I think back over my association career, what has ASAE meant to me? I'm a certified association executive, CAE through ASAE. Why did I do that program two decades ago? Because it helped me get my first job as a CEO and as an at an association because I could tell them that I got the education from the association of associations about how to run an association.

And going to ASAE's program with Sidecar to get educated about how to use AI in an association is just a great opportunity for all associations to take advantage of these tools. So I'm excited about that partnership as well. 

Dave Will: Boards are starting. Boards have noticed AI, so boards, for better or worse, [00:22:00] I think we have in the association space.

What I've witnessed in my work with associations is that boards are incredibly helpful and valuable and also very difficult and frustrating at the same time. Because essentially for staff members, you're working in the operations of the business. Probably know what you wanna do next. Now you gotta convince the board to jump on the bandwagon with you, and sometimes that's difficult to do.

As the boards are starting to ask more questions about ai, how do you think the certification helps professionals lead those conversations? Talk. Maybe you don't even have to answer that question. Just talk to me about how do we convince boards. To get on board with AI and specifically the certification.

Amme, take that one. 

Amith Nagarajan: Happy to. So I've been asked to speak to a number of boards by CEOs who believe that AI is going to drive change, but they're books don't buy it yet. And so what's 

Dave Will: your email [00:23:00] address Amith? 

Amith Nagarajan: It's Amith@bluecypress.io, just a Amith@bluecypress.io. Feel free.

Dave Will: I figured that might be a good time to plug that in there in case somebody wants your help and convince you for it.

But go on, tell, what do you tell? 

Amith Nagarajan: I love doing that, Dave. And hit me on LinkedIn too. I'm on LinkedIn a little bit too obsessively, but I've been asked to speak to a bunch of boards over time and speak at conferences and stuff, and when I do this. What I typically am sensing in the room is that the board doesn't yet really buy into the vision of their staff that they've hired that, whether it's the CEO, others, and part of that is because they don't think that those folks necessarily know that much about ai.

It was a year or two ago that boards generally themselves that didn't have much of an idea of ai, but now I'm finding that boards, they're not necessarily super well educated in ai, but they have a. Much better sense of it than they did a year or two ago, but they're not necessarily feeling that their staff is prepared.

And so when they bring in an outside expert to say, okay, this is the way AI can shape the association, that is helpful. But it doesn't matter how many outside [00:24:00] experts you get, we've got tons of them over here. Our business includes chewing, lots of consulting. We've got software companies that produce AI products.

We think, obviously they're all great, but they will make absolutely zero difference to your association by themselves if you don't educate your own people. And so the point of the certification is to bolster confidence in yourself that you know a good bit about AI and to showcase to your community, including your board, that you're prepared to do this.

And so that's just step one. Now I will say two quick things about education that are really important. And I think this is true for all education. It's extremely true for AI specifically, and that is you have to start small. You can't just start, you can't swallow the elephant in one bite, and two is you have to maintain your knowledge.

You cannot assume that just because you have earned a certification, whatever certification it is that you're quote unquote good on AI because AI is changing at this ridiculously fast rate. Even those of us who spend basically all of our waking hours trying to learn this stuff, deploy it, build solutions with it, we're all overwhelmed if [00:25:00] we tell you the truth.

It's extremely overwhelming. The technology is doubling in power at roughly a six month interval. So just think about that for a minute. Every six months that this technology doubles in power, that makes Moore's Law, which we benefited from and still benefit from for decades. Quaint in comparison. Moore's Law basically stated that computing would double in power relative to price roughly every 24 months.

And it did like clockwork for years and years. And the compounding of that resulted in actually what. Powers ai, but it was actually a very slow curve compared to what's happening now. So the point is that knowing what you think you know about ai, if your knowledge is circa 2025 and it's 2026, you're outta date.

And so from our perspective, the way we try to approach it is to get you started with small, consumable bites and then to keep feeding you over time. So our program isn't a one and done. Yes, there's the certification. Most people earn it in about six to eight weeks of time. It's about 20 hours of total time [00:26:00] commitment to earn it.

But the key to it is that to maintain your certification, you have to do work every year. You have to do a certain number of additional education. This is very common in association certification programs. We provide a couple courses a year that are what we call refreshers that update your knowledge. So that you can understand what's changed every six months.

And then in addition to that, we ask you to complete some additional coursework, either from us at sidecar or from anyone else that you choose, that you bring to us and we authenticate. So I think it's really important to think about both of those dimensions. It's a start small because otherwise you'll be overwhelmed by it.

You won't do anything. Most people I know, they say, I really wanna get started with ai, but I haven't had time. And I ask them, okay, what about 15 minutes tomorrow morning? Do you have 15 minutes tomorrow morning? And they say, yeah, I could probably make 15 minutes tomorrow morning. I'm like, okay, cool. Do that.

And then what about the next morning? You have 15 minutes and so on, right? And it's, the idea is if you carve out a small amount of time, it can take you 15 minutes. If you've got a half an hour, even better. But do something every day. Listen to a [00:27:00] podcast, play with some type of software, read a book, watch a YouTube video.

There's so many resources. Obviously Sidecar has great content that's at this intersection, but if you do something consistently, that's when you're gonna become an expert. You have to stay at it. 

Dave Will: Jason, tell me about your experience. As a CEO there leading the charge with ai, and tell me what was relevant, whether it was your exchange at the board, or your influence of your employees, or maybe it's the interest started at the staff level and they brought you along.

Tell me about your experience in embracing AI at ITI. 

Jason Oxman: Yeah, and I think as we've been talking about, there's some natural hesitancy to overcome because people are worried about what it means for their jobs. 

Dave Will: Were you hesitant or was your staff hesitant? 

Jason Oxman: I think the staff was hesitant. Okay. The board was certainly, and our board is not made up of technical experts.

Ironically, given who we represented as an industry, the board conversation was more about [00:28:00] just making sure that the tools we use are beneficial to the membership. But we took a bottom up approach to it. We didn't take a top down approach because the board was not driving the conversation about AI usage.

It was more about people on the staff being familiar with the industry. We represent all of the large model companies that are making these AI tools available. So it's obviously part of our daily life here at the organization, but not the technical side. Again, we are a government affairs policy focused organization.

So that bottom up approach meant we had a staff team that we formed, a staff working group who were interested in using AI to develop the. Policies and procedures for the use. 'cause that's important to have on board the acceptable use policy. How do we use it? How, what do we disclose about when we're using AI with a membership?

But also just looking at what kind of tasks were amenable to using AI to improve. So we started with use cases. Small ones that were actually pretty easy to deploy. Summaries of meetings, for example, email [00:29:00] drafting, for example, research on behalf of our members rather than trying to revolutionize everything at once and take on AI capabilities for everything.

And that bottom up approach led to the rest of the organization saying, oh, I see you can actually use AI in a way that makes it more efficient. You can do minutes of committee meetings a lot more quickly and move on to something else that's more strategic. So that approach really worked to help the rest of the staff.

See this as an opportunity. See the tools as something that could, IM improve the way they were able to do their jobs. 

Dave Will: Jason, what's the best way to reach you if people wanna connect with you? 

Jason Oxman: I'm on LinkedIn at J-O-X-M-A-N, Jason Oxman, or my email address is joxman@itic.org. 

Dave Will: Amith. Jason, thank you for the time today.

Is there anything that's in the back of your mind that you wish I asked? Is there anything you wanna say before we wrap it up? Amith, why don't you go first if you have something. 

Amith Nagarajan: I have a quick thing, which is the question people often don't [00:30:00] ask, but are probably thinking, which is, why should I do this right now?

Yeah. My answer to that is very simple. The speed at which this is moving will leave you behind if you don't get started. It is totally something you can do no matter where you're at today, but that won't always be true if you just sit on it. You have to go take action. I think every leader at every level needs to do this. This is not a thing for staff. This is a thing for CEOs. This is a thing for boards. This is a thing for everyone, and on the everyone comment I'll end with. I think that if you do not provide your staff with both the opportunity and frankly the mandate to learn AI, you're not only really underserving your own organization, but you're hurting your people.

The question you should ask yourself is those who are not. Very skilled with AI within six, 12, certainly 24 months. Will they be sought after as employees by you or by any other organization? And the answer is a pretty clear no. That you will not be employable [00:31:00] if you don't know ai. So as a leader, it's really your responsibility to make sure your team's future is bright with you and perhaps beyond your organization.

And so that's why I think this is such a serious topic for us to jump on. 

Dave Will: Amith, you said an interesting word, “mandate,” and I gotta say, at least in my company, granted we're a software company, but I don't think it's about software. We get so excited, like we get so worked up and excited about the things we're doing differently using ai.

I do not need to mandate. The interest. We, I don't need to force it down people's throats. People love digging in. And the more, like most things, the more you get passionate about something, the more you want to do it over and over. And it's incredible the passion we have on our end around ai. Jason, anything you want to add before we wrap this?

Jason Oxman: The only thing I'd add to your excellent questions, Dave, is the question of [00:32:00] associations thinking about how to improve their own practices and procedures using ai. We've been talking about that kind of the inward looking questions, but also encouraging some outward looking questions. Associations have customers who are their members, they represent industries.

What can associations deploy these tools on behalf of their members, make capabilities available that serve their members or the industries they represent. And obviously, Amith has done exactly that with the partnership with ASAE, ASAE's customers, their community, their members are other associations. So these tools that Amith has has deployed on behalf of the association community are what ASAE is providing to their customers.

But of course, there's an association for everything. So we should all be thinking about how we can help our members and our industries. Also use these tools to help satisfy the challenges that they have through AI education. 

Dave Will: That's a great point, Jason. Some of the most innovative associations that I've worked with in the past have built their own software companies or [00:33:00] invested in software companies or come up with incredibly creative.

Tools or services for their members that drive additional revenue? Uh, yeah, that's a great point, Jason. 

Amith Nagarajan: I agree completely with that. I just wanna say that that's where associations looking at the industries they serve are going to thrive because those are the services and products that people want to buy from you, that they're not yet buying from your associations.

And it's also. A completely achievable goal. We actually help a bunch of associations create branded, tailored content just for their industries, and there's lots of ways to go about that, but it's an achievable goal, and it's something I think associations are perfectly positioned to go after and both capitalize on and deliver extraordinarily value to their members.

Dave Will: And to add to the list. I'm Dave Will, also on LinkedIn. My email is dave@propfuel.com. Thank you, Jason. Thank you Amith. And thank you to everyone for listening to this episode of Associations NOW Presents. Join us each month as we explore key [00:34:00] topics relevant to association professionals, discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field today, and highlight the significant impact associations have on the economy, the US, and the world.