Does Your AI Strategy Start in the Wrong Place?

The first AI investment shouldn’t be technology

INSIGHTS

7/21/20262 min read

“The following scenario is fictional but reflects challenges we increasingly see across membership organizations.”

The board meeting ended with unanimous approval. The association would invest in Artificial Intelligence.

Within weeks, an AI chatbot had been launched. Meeting notes were automatically summarized. Marketing teams began generating content in minutes instead of hours. Staff experimented with new AI assistants and productivity tools.

The technology worked exactly as promised.

Six months later, the CEO presented an update to the board.

Membership growth had not changed. Renewals remained flat. Staff were still answering the same repetitive questions. Volunteers still struggled to find the information they needed. Members still had to search multiple systems before finding the right answer.

The Chair finally asked a simple question.

“If we switched off every AI tool tomorrow, would our members notice?”

The room fell silent.

The problem was not that the association had chosen the wrong technology.

It had started with technology instead of the member experience.

The Research

This challenge extends well beyond associations.

According to the latest McKinsey & Company global AI survey, 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, yet only a minority have successfully scaled AI across the organization to create measurable enterprise-wide value.

More importantly, McKinsey found that the single strongest predictor of AI creating a measurable business impact was not deploying more AI tools; it was redesigning workflows. Among all the factors studied, organizations that fundamentally rethought how work gets done consistently achieved better outcomes than those simply layering AI onto existing processes.

Their research also found that only 21% of organizations using generative AI have fundamentally redesigned at least some of their workflows, highlighting how many organizations remain in the experimentation phase rather than true transformation.

Recent industry analysis reaches the same conclusion: organizations rarely fail because AI technology is inadequate. They struggle because governance, incentives, ownership, and operating models remain unchanged.

What This Means for Associations

Associations should resist asking:

Which chatbot should we buy?

Which AI platform should we implement?

How quickly can we deploy AI?

Instead, leadership teams should begin with a different set of questions.

Where do members experience the greatest friction?

Which questions consume the most staff time every week?

Where is organizational knowledge difficult to find?

Which volunteer or customer interactions could become faster, more personalized, and available around the clock?

If we redesigned the member journey today, where would AI genuinely improve the experience?

These questions shift AI from being an IT initiative to becoming a strategic capability that strengthens member value.

For associations, AI is no longer simply about efficiency. It is becoming a competitive differentiator that influences member experience, operational capacity, and long-term relevance.

Question for Your Next Board Meeting

If every AI tool disappeared tomorrow, what part of your member experience would members actually miss?

If the answer is “very little,” your AI strategy may have started in the wrong place.