The AI Revolution
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What’s Next for CIOs and AI

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AI misuse and training is high on the minds of association tech leaders. But so is efficiency and financial opportunity.

Simone A. Bielsker, CAE, program director of information systems at the American Staffing Association, has a long wish list for how the association’s staff can use AI, including content and analytics. But the list of questions she has is nearly as long. To that end, her priority at ASA is developing a technology adoption survey that clarifies how staff members are using AI tools and where they want to go next.

“We want a better idea of what exactly you are using,” she says. “How often are you using it? What is your appetite for learning new technologies? What AI tools are you using, and why are you using them?”

Bielsker sees the technology adoption survey as a first step in future planning, to make sure that staff has the resources to do their jobs more efficiently in areas where AI can help. But it’s also an intervention of sorts, to ensure that staffers aren’t plugging ASA’s intellectual property into large language models or drawing false conclusions from analytics tools.

“With generative AI, especially around analytics, you need to understand how those analytics handle decision-making,” she says. “The generative AI part of that is not that difficult—we have all of that right now. It gives you an amazing amount of information. But utilizing that information is a different skill set.”

“The generative AI part of that is not that difficult. But utilizing that information is a different skill set.” —Simone A. Bielsker

Slow and Steady

Protecting information while giving staff opportunities to explore AI’s potential for creativity and efficiency is a chief concern of Carlos Cardenas, CAE, senior director of information technology at the National Board of Certification and Recertification for Nurse Anesthetists. Because NBCRNA is a credentialing organization, it’s been using AI tools for cheat detection. But it treads carefully around expanding its use, with leaders asking staff to justify the use of any AI tool before diving in.

“We’re saying that you need to get permission from your supervisor, and there has to be a business case,” he says. “They want to know: How does this [tool] align with a business problem?”

As a technology leader, Cardenas says he recognizes the policy as a way to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios around reckless use of AI. But he says he also encourages staff to look for ways to experiment within that framework. Cardenas says he regularly talks with testing and communications leaders at NBCRNA about effective use cases. “When we talk about how we can influence decisions, we always come back to proof of concept,” he says. He cites an example of potentially using AI to segment and analyze registrations for its certification program, to encourage more participation.

“We know how hard approval can be to get but I want to keep opening doors to get our staff to continue to experiment,” he says. “I want to create and foster that culture of experimentation and innovation. That’s true with any technology, really, and I want to follow that model for generative AI.”

Staying Human

ASA’s Bielsker says her priority in the coming months is to better understand the staff challenges that AI can help address. “We know what the pain points are, but we don’t know how bad those pain points are,” she says.

But any decision to increase use around AI, she says, will require being wrapped around training that emphasizes the importance of human management of the tools. Humanity, after all, is a handy tool for productivity and efficiency too.

“One of our board members recently got a big piece of business, and the customer said the reason they did was, ‘You’re the only one that didn’t sound the same on the RFP,’” she says. “Everybody else was doing it with ChatGPT, and that made them sound absolutely perfect, but they weren’t the ones that put thoughtful time into it. We want to be those thoughtful people.”

Mark Athitakis

Mark Athitakis, a contributing editor for Associations Now, has written on nonprofits, the arts, and leadership for a variety of publications. He is a coauthor of The Dumbest Moments in Business History and hopes you never qualify for the sequel.

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