How Will AI Affect Membership Management?

Did you know that several police forces and armies are trialling the use of AI-controlled robots? I’m not talking about harmless and slightly annoying phone operator robots, either. They are trialling proper honest to goodness in the field robots, including the phenomenally creepy “Spot” from the genuine geniuses at Boston Dynamics. 

If you aren't seeing what's so creepy about Spot, look at the Boston Dynamics YouTube page, where you can see Spot and Atlas being more athletic than 90% of humans. Spot and Atlas might be about to change the face of warfare, but they aren’t going to have any impact on the world of membership management. 

Today, however, we will explore how other advancements in AI technology will affect the future of membership management and how we at Member Jungle plan to adapt to this evolving technology.

To do this, I interviewed Michael Barwell, the founder and CEO of Member Jungle, to get a better idea of how AI will change the membership management landscape.  

How Will AI Affect The Future Of Membership?

• What is AI?
• Will AI Replace Membership Management Systems?
• How Will AI Change Membership Management?
• How Member Jungle Is Embracing AI 

What Is AI? 

Artificial Intelligence is defined as “the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems.” Tech Target. 

AI is actually used quite commonly today in almost every field; you have definitely used AI at least once today. Some common examples of AI are Google Maps, facial recognition, autocorrect, recommendation algorithms, Digital Assistants (Siri, Alexa), Social media algorithms and online payments. 

Will AI Replace Membership Management Systems?  

No. Like many industries, membership management will be altered by the further development of AI. However, Membership management won't be one of the industries replaced by AI automation. Instead, it will be one of the industries helped by the advancement of AI technology. For the foreseeable future, they will always be a real person on the other side of your membership management system to help you. 

How Will AI Change Membership Management?

It’s probably not accurate to say AI will change membership management; it's more accurate to say that AI will alter parts of membership management. AI will speed up and automate parts of membership management, making it better and more accurate for you, the customer. 

Natural Language Searching

AI is already improving natural language searching, and it will likely be a commonplace part of membership management systems within the next year or two. If you don't know, natural language searching is where you can search for a piece of information the way you would search it in Google or ask another person. 

In practice, this means instead of filtering your member data to see your most engaged members, you will simply be able to type “who are my top 30 most engaged members” into a search bar and in seconds, you will have the answer. This will save you a lot of time and make for a more intuitive experience.  

Natural language searching will likely be appearing on membership platforms, and Excel spreadsheets within months. In fact Google Sheets already has natural language searching available. 

Data reporting

Speaking of searching through data, the data reporting and analytics widgets that we at Member Jungle offer and those that most of our competitors offer already use AI features. You set what information you want to see, and the data analytics finds that information and displays it in easy-to-understand widgets for you. 

As AI continues to improve, these data reporting and analytics widgets will also improve. They will become faster, more accurate and be able to display more complicated information. 

Data Security 

Over the coming years, AI will become an incredibly important part of securing your data on membership management systems. The way this is likely to look is that AI will be able to constantly monitor your website and management system for any signs of malware or hackers. If something is detected, it will be able to securely lock down your site much quicker than the standard practices today. 

Another big plus of this is because AI can learn, it will be able to constantly adapt to anything new that the malware and hackers try. This will lead to improved and smart security protection for your member data, which is always evolving and has lightning-fast reaction times.  At Member Jungle we already use security and performance management systems that use deep learning AI algorithms.

AI can now generate pretty spectacular images from simple word prompts that you feed it. This means that before too long, AI will be incorporated into the visual design of your website and management system pages. Instead of selecting from premade templates, you will have the option to simply type in what sort of design you want, and the AI will make it for you. 

Based on the result I got when I tried to do it with this Dall-e and the prompt “an Instagram ad, with a slogan for a car club”, I think it’s safe to say that we aren't quite there yet, but it will not be far away at all. Note that for trademark reasons, the current crop of image creation tools will not insert real words (unless of course that is an unusual European language).

 

 

AI-Powered Chatbots Instead Of Support Widgets

Another part of membership management that is likely to change is for companies to start using AI-powered chatbots, like ChatGPT, to help with support. When you have an issue or question about your membership management system, you can talk to a chatbot who will be able to help you. 

These chatbots will be able to process natural language, will have learnt from past help experiences and will be able to direct you to the answers you are looking for. 

Now I cannot speak for the rest of the industry, but Member Jungle will always have real people to help you as well as using these chatbots. 

Disclaimer 

It is worth noting that we are talking about developing technology and making educated assessments on how we believe this industry will develop. Everything we just covered is our best scientific estimate of what will happen in the years to come. Now though, let's talk about what Member Jungle is doing with this advancement in AI technology. 

How Member Jungle Is Embracing AI To Help You Run Your Club

We’ve already touched on a few things that Member Jungle is doing with AI, but let’s take a deeper dive into what we have planned. 

Member Jungle And Google Looker

At Member Jungle, we are collaborating with Google to integrate Google Looker into our membership management system. This will enhance your ability to analyse and comprehend data. 

Looker offers an intuitive way for you to use natural language to explore and visualise data. It will enable you to generate interactive reports and dashboards, pose questions about your data, and share insights with others. This tool will empower you and your club to make informed decisions based on a greater depth of data with greater ease and efficiency. 

More Advanced AI-Powered Data Reporting

Member Jungle already uses AI-powered data reporting and analytics widgets, as we have established. We are closely monitoring the development in this field to ensure we always keep Member Jungle’s data reporting capabilities up to date. 

More Advanced Data Security

We pride ourselves on taking the data security of our customers extremely seriously. We are paying attention to how AI can be used to improve our data security. However, we will not start changing how our current security works until we are 100% sure of all the possible risks and as usual we go through a staged approach when we implement new versions of security products. 

If you want to know more about how Member Jungle keeps your member data safe you can read this, How does Member Jungle protect your data?

AI-Powered Resource Management

It may sound boring, but using AI behind the scenes at Member Jungle is going to have a big impact on our customers. AI will allow the Member Jungle membership management system to adapt to who is and isn't using the system in real-time, allowing for resources to be allocated to where they are needed most.

The only way this will affect you as the customer is you should experience even higher performance, and shorter loading times when you are using your club's management system. 

AI Tech Support

As we have already said, Member Jungle is looking to implement AI-powered chatbots to help you with any problem. You will be able to explain to these chatbots in plain everyday English what your problem is and what you need help with, and they will be able to give you answers and direct you to the right help pages. 

Please be assured that real tech support professionals will always be available to assist you if you encounter further issues or prefer not to communicate with the AI. We guarantee that you will never be left alone with only the AI for support.

What Else Can AI Do To Help My Club?

So, we’ve established how AI will likely affect the future of membership management and how Member Jungle plans on using AI to keep making running your club easier. 

If you’re curious about what else you can do with AI read: How you can use AI to help your club in 2023

If you want to know more about how Member Jungle is continually improving its service read: Member Jungle Product Releases: What It Means For Your Club