Community AI

Excerpt from the upcoming second edition of Community-in-a-Box

I often say that writing a book is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. Actually, Elon Musk said that, and he was referring to starting a company. Despite the differences, there are times when I think I would prefer chewing on shards of glass than putting a book together.

Over four years ago, I had the brilliant idea to write a book, so I am familiar with the experience. Much of the process was painless despite several very late night and early morning sessions to push out chapters, do rewrites, and edit down my manuscript to a reasonable length. When I finally wrapped up that last paragraph, I had assembled 50,000 words in a little over two months, all without consuming any glass.

I am now returning to my book, Community-in-a-Box, to fix all the things I initially screwed up. In the process of fixing, tweaking, and updating the entire book front to back, I realized there was a whole lot more stuff that I never touched or considered. What was meant to be a one month, bang it out, and ship a simple second edition, has now become a glass munching four month slog.

Someone mentioned to me that I should use AI to write the book. That would certainly be easier, but it would also have as much soul as a John Tesh album. Instead, I put some actual thought into the updated edition to reflect what I have learned and unlearned over the course of four years speaking about and living the topic.

And what topic is that? Hopefully you said community because I just shared the title of the book two paragraphs ago. Anyway, it is a subject near and dear to my heart as I have been involved in community work for over a decade. That includes not just founding my own communities, but also my time at Stack Overflow and AWS where I actively built and supported communities of developers and startup founders.

The book is nearing completion, I promise. There are a bunch of people that have been waiting, including the fifty wonderful contributors who graciously shared a snippet of their community wisdom for inclusion in the book. And to those folks that keep bugging me for the Audiobook version or a translated copy in X language, I will absolutely maybe have something ready sometime between not now and later.

In my excitement of (almost) reaching the end, I wanted to share an excerpt from the book below. AI comes up in literally every conversation I have about technology, and it is clear AI is upending the status quo across industries and domains. Community is not immune to this trend, but it has lagged behind in adoption and integration. I am firmly in the camp that Community AI is on the cusp of happening, so enjoy this brief segment from the chapter on future trends focused on how AI will impact the work of communities. Thanks!

Mark Birch

One of the most groundbreaking technology trends over the past three years has been the rise of Generative AI. In fact, it might be an innovation that is bigger than the Web, social media, or smartphones. When you look at the pace of major inflection points in technology, big platform shifts occur every twenty years. The first jump was from mainframes to PC’s in the 80’s. Then the industry shifted from PC’s to cloud platforms in the early 2000’s, things like cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, and consumer mobile apps. We are now entering the age of the AI platform.

As you can guess from the term, AI platform means more than just a chatbot. Those were simply tools that helped to introduce and popularize the new advances in AI driven by large language models (“LLM’s”) trained by powerful infrastructure using AI optimized chips called GPU’s. This entire platform stack allowed anyone with an Internet connection to create text, images, and even movies as well as tap into API’s to build AI enabled applications without being a machine learning expert or data scientist.

AI is already having a significant impact in how we use technology and how it shapes our experience. AI is making product and content recommendations, entering our support interactions, and automating mundane tasks. Through the power of Agentic AI, tasks can be chained together into multi-step workflows fully orchestrated by AI to perform decision making and solve problems. While there is still often a human in the loop for safety and control reasons, AI is able to handle the bulk of the work at scale and much faster than with previous generations of technology.

These new capabilities of AI have the potential to radically transform entire industries from biotech to farming to shipping. AI is also changing how we think about work inside companies from sales and marketing to product and engineering. There are now AI sales agents, AI coding assistant tools, and AI content generators. From an operations standpoint, domains like HR and finance stand to see enormous productivity gains by removing a lot of repetitive, manual, and time consuming undifferentiated work. Even meetings are being reinvented with tools to create agendas, summarize meeting points, provide follow up recommendation, and monitor progress on action items.

One of first things I noticed when I started getting involved in community work was just how much of the work was complete drudgery. Creating event materials, connecting members, moderating content, managing sponsors, and organizing all of the videos and photos from events. When I was running the Enterprise Sales Forum, even hiring a full-time admin and streamlining tasks did not fully address all of the tedious and redundant tasks needed to run the community. There is a huge opportunity for AI to eliminate a lot of the work involved with communities.

The even bigger and bolder opportunity however is to use AI to enhance the community experience for members. Take for example how you meet people at events. Most of the time you only get to meet the people that you are nearest to, not necessarily the people that would be most helpful to you. AI can determine the best matches before the event and create pre-introductions for you to meet each other. For members just joining the community, AI can customize the onboarding experience by suggesting ideas for getting involved based on their background and interests. Another idea is to monitor community engagement to identify potential ambassadors and use an AI agent to launch a series of tasks to incentivize the member to join the ambassador program. These are the type of tasks that would normally be time consuming and require a lot of data wrangling, all of which are easily handled with the help of AI.

The possibilities for AI in shaping the community management and member experience are limitless. In a time where cost is still an important consideration, deploying AI can reduce the resources dedicated to ongoing management for both independent and organization aligned communities*. On the revenue side, AI opens up possibilities by helping to surface business opportunities, recruit new members, and entice sponsors. We are just at the beginning stages of this AI revolution and communities stand to be one of the biggest beneficiaries!

*Organization aligned communities are communities built around a company and its products.

Yes, the book I have been mentioning over the past few months will soon be a reality! I am excited about the second edition and all of the new ground that it covers including future trends, community business models, community metrics, and exiting a community. At the risk of falling on my face publicly if I do not actually get this done, I will be releasing the book on my birthday, March 18.

Back in Taiwan soon!

Because I have been furiously writing, I have not done much in the way of socializing. I will be returning to Taiwan though, landing on the evening of February 6th. I am looking forward to connecting with my Taipei friends after the Lunar New Year! If you will be in town, let’s make plans to have tea.