On June 4, association professionals and industry partners gathered in Richmond for VSAE’s first-ever AI Summit. We touched on tools and tech, but the bigger focus was on the strategic questions association leaders need to be asking right now—around policy, legal risks, data management, and workforce readiness. 

What stood out to me was the shared sense that we’re all walking an AI high wire—trying to strike the right balance between setting up structure and guardrails, while also staying curious and moving forward, even if we don’t have it all figured out yet.

AUTHOR'S ATTESTATION: This article was written entirely by Jeff De Cagna FRSA FASAE, a human author, without using generative AI.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended dozens of webinars and online sessions. This is not an unusual statement for a person whose privileged life made it possible to remain largely sequestered from direct harm during the 2020 lockdown period. Far more unexpected, however, is that I continue to think deeply about (and act on) the words of one webinar presenter. Maria Luciana Axente, serving then (and now) as PWC’s Responsible AI & AI for Good Lead, challenged her audience to accept that we all must be AI ethicists because our futures were on the line as AI development and adoption continued apace, and addressing AI’s ethical problems and questions required the full participation of a genuine diversity of voices and perspectives. 

To say that today’s buyer has changed would be a bit of a massive understatement. In fact, we’ve never seen such change in such a short period of time. When you consider how we’ve evolved since the advent of the internet (it became mainstream in 1996) and then throw on top of that all the digital behaviors that were catapulted by the recent pandemic, the results are stunning.

To name a couple:

• Today’s buyer, on average, is more than 70% through the buying cycle BEFORE they actually speak to a sales person. (Forrester)