Beyond the Buzz: How AI Can Empower Every Association

In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, guest host Camille Sanders, CAE, director of chapter operations and programs at ISACA and host of LeadHERship Bytes, sits down with Carlos Cardenas, CAE, AAiP, senior strategic advisor at DelCor and co-founder of Association Latinos, for a forward-thinking discussion on the future of AI in associations. Carlos shares how his personal journey with AI began during retirement planning and evolved into a passion for helping associations—especially smaller ones—use AI strategically to thrive. The conversation explores practical concepts like the “quarterback agent” for task management, the value of experiential learning, and aligning AI tools with real business goals. Together, they highlight how associations can embrace AI innovation while ensuring inclusivity and equity for Latinx members and beyond.

Check out the video podcast here:

https://youtu.be/rw3813NLPe4

This episode is sponsored by the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.

 

Transcript

Camille Sanders: [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 your host today, Camille Sanders. In addition to my role as director of chapter operations and programs at ISACA, I also host LeadHERship Bytes, an independent podcast highlighting the career and personal journeys of inspiring women across industries.

You can find it on any major podcast platform. Now, before we dive in, we would like to thank this episode sponsor the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau Now. Let's get into the really fun stuff. I'm very excited for today's conversation where we're talking about the future of AI in associations with Carlos [00:01:00] Cardenas, the senior strategic advisor at DelCor, and a co-founder of Association Latinos.

Welcome, Carlos. 

Carlos Cardenas: Hi Camille. How are you? Thanks for having me. 

Camille Sanders: You are very welcome. We're excited to talk with you today. So I just want to be fully transparent with our audience that I know Carlos personally and I know about. Some of your exciting writings and the things that you've been doing in terms of educating associations around experimentation and adaptation of ai.

And I know that journey started for you with something really personal around your retirement planning, and that's a really unusual journey. That's not where most of us start. So can you talk to us a little bit about what sparked that idea for you? 

Carlos Cardenas: Sure. No, I will say just like everybody else, right?

October, 2022, OpenAI dropped chat GPT version 3.0, [00:02:00] and it shook the world. It shocked the world, and so everybody started to experiment and say, how does this relate to me? How can I use this? How can I leverage it? I wrote a LinkedIn article in January talking about the directions that it could go. One of 'em was a travel advisor, one of 'em was a strategic advisor.

A couple other things as well. Fast forward a couple years, right? And so I'm, I'm relatively young, I won't say my age, but I like to think about the future. I like to think about financial independence, not necessarily retirement, but financial independence. And so I started to go down the road of what does retirement, or what does financial independence look like for me?

And you've got your traditional 401k in the workplace and you've got your employer match. Outside of that, you might do Roth IRAs, you might dabble in crypto, you might have some other investment vehicles, and so I do a lot of the work myself. And so [00:03:00] I look at websites, I look at market trends, but I'm like, how can I leverage some of these tools to help me so I don't have to do a lot of the heavy lifting?

I like to experiment. I downloaded open source models of my own. I purchased an NVIDIA graphics card. I've got that installed on my home desktop computer. But I run these models and experiment with them, and I use generative I to help me build agents. So I can have one agent that does it all, and you might get to that later on, but I felt I wanted to build an ecosystem of agents to help me with these various aspects.

So what I've been able to do so far in terms of retirement or financial independence is build an agent. I'll say it's probably 70% of the way done, but it goes to the marketplace. It looks at the s and p 500, and it comes back and it gives me that information, and then it builds a dashboard for me. So I can look at my financial portfolio and I can have it send me emails.

[00:04:00] And so basically it's my assistant to say, how am I doing? The market took a downturn, or it's