Bringing AI to Life: Practical Steps for Associations

In this episode of Associations NOW Presents, guest host Joanna Pineda of the Associations Thrive podcast chats with Rob Wenger, CEO of Higher Logic, and Amanda DeLuke, senior privacy analyst at Higher Logic. The conversation unpacks Higher Logic's own AI adoption journey, starting in October 2023, and the strategies they used to engage employees with AI tools. Rob and Amanda share practical insights on how associations can begin their AI journey, create policies, and leverage AI tools while prioritizing data privacy. Whether you're just getting started or looking to expand your AI capabilities, this episode offers actionable advice on using AI to enhance operations, improve member engagement, and drive innovation.

Check out the video podcast here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLKUv2GFpUY  

This episode is sponsored by Higher Logic.

Associations NOW Presents is produced by Association Briefings.

 

Transcript

Joanna Pineda: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, I'm Joanna Pineda, CEO and Chief Troublemaker at Matrix Group International and host of the Associations Thrive podcast. Each week I interview and association our non profit CEO about their personal journey and the things their organization is doing to thrive. But today, I am thrilled to be a guest host for the ASAE podcast for Associations Now.

And I am absolutely honored because I'm going to be interviewing Rob Wenger. CEO of HigherLogic and Amanda DeLuke, Senior Privacy Analyst. We'd like to thank our episode sponsor, HigherLogic, for their support of this podcast. Rob and Amanda, welcome to the show.

Rob Wenger: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Joanna Pineda: Hey Rob, there's probably two people out there in the universe that don't know HigherLogic, and for those two people, tell us about HigherLogic.

Rob Wenger: So our main product is online community. It's a place where associations members can talk to each other, share documents, ask questions, network, all the kinds of good stuff that they might do in person. They do it online 365 days a year. And we also make marketing automation products and a bunch of other different add-ons to it, like volunteer management.

Mentor management, a lot of different things that really are geared toward helping associations and their members connect.

Joanna Pineda: Amanda, you've got an interesting title. Your title is Senior Privacy Analyst. What is a Senior Privacy Analyst at HgherLogic?

Amanda DeLuke: Yeah, so I am definitely someone that works across the company.

You know, privacy is really everyone's problem, right? Everyone works together, creating privacy champions. So I actually report to the legal team. I deal with audit and making sure we are compliant for any applicable privacy laws, also working with our sales team and our data processing agreement and working with marketing.

So really just collaboration across the company, just to make sure we're staying safe. And we're adhering to any applicable [00:02:00] laws and staying compliant. Well, that's

Joanna Pineda: really interesting because today our topic is AI. And Robyn and Vanda, I'm really curious to learn almost two sides of the AI journey at HigherLogic because I bet you're integrating AI into HigherLogic products, but I'm also really curious to learn about your AI journey as a company.

Like how do you get people trained up and excited about AI so that now it becomes part of the culture? So what do you want to start with?

Rob Wenger: Yeah, so we sort of kicked off our internal AI journey in October 2023. I had this idea and I guess in August, Hey, let's get everyone in the company using AI like for a day, like sort of one of those hackathon type thing.

And then report back on what they did that was cool. And so I started kicking this thing off and then the folks in legal and Amanda's team said, Hey, hey, let us. Think about this privacy stuff first. Don't just jump into this. So we spent a little bit of [00:03:00] time putting it together. We ended up doing a whole month.

AI October we called it.

Joanna Pineda: And this was in 2023.

Rob Wenger: 2023, right, so October 2023. And so we spent a bunch of time, Amanda's team spent a bunch of time coming up with sort of the rules of the thing. Like don't just go use any tool and don't put customer data in it and all these kinds of great things. She developed processes and stuff like that.

I'll let her talk about that because she knows way more about it than I do, but then we ended up doing it as a full month, and the idea was everyone spend 16 hours in October. Do some stuff, get in the teams of one, two or three, play with these tools and come back and report back. And what we ended up doing is havin