Last week I was in Baltimore for the CESSE CEO Meeting. If you're not familiar, CESSE brings together CEOs of scientific and engineering societies. Normally about 100 leaders attend. But this year, round one of the East Coast snowstorms had other plans. We ended up with 40-45 in person, with the rest joining remotely.
Here's the thing about smaller groups: you get deeper conversations. Less surface-level networking, more real talk about what's actually keeping people up at night.
Two themes kept coming up. And I think they point to something bigger than just "how do we use AI."
Theme 1: The Association as Innovation Engine
The first theme was about speed. How do associations move from identifying a member need to actually delivering something useful? The traditional model is slow. You survey members, go through committee review, maybe pilot something, eventually launch. By the time you ship, the need has evolved.
Several CEOs were wrestling with how to become more like an incubator or accelerator. Not in a startup sense, but in terms of how they think about creating and delivering member value. Shorter cycles. More experimentation. Co-creating with members rather than just for them.
One CEO put it simply: "We need to stop acting like a publishing company and start acting like a product company."
Theme 2: The Association as Platform
The second theme went deeper. It wasn't just about doing things faster. It was about rethinking what an association fundamentally is.
The traditional model: associations are hubs. Members visit periodically. They come to the conference, read the journal, maybe call member services when they have a question. Value gets delivered in discrete moments.
The emerging model: associations are platforms. Members interact continuously. They query your knowledge base through an AI agent at 2am. They pull benchmarking data in real time instead of waiting for the annual report. Their organizations integrate association resources directly into their own workflows.
This is a fundamental shift. You're not just delivering content. You're becoming infrastructure that members build on top of.
Why This Matters: The 7 Powers Lens
Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers framework identifies the strategic moats that make businesses durably valuable. If you haven't read it, the seven are: Scale Economies, Network Economies, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resource, and Process Power.
Here's what struck me: associations already have two of the strongest powers.
Network Economies. The value of membership increases as more members join. More peers to connect with. More data to benchmark against. More collective voice for advocacy. This is built into the association model.
Cornered Resource. Associations sit on decades of proprietary content, member data, credentialing authority, and institutional knowledge that no one else has. This is genuinely hard to replicate.
The problem? These powers are eroding.
LinkedIn gives you the professional network. Coursera and LinkedIn Learning give you the education. Credly and blockchain credentials give you the certification. Slack communities and Discord servers give you the peer connections. The switching costs that kept members locked in are getting lower every year.
If associations don't find ways to activate and strengthen their existing powers, those powers will decay.
Platform Thinking Is How You Protect the Moat
This is where platform thinking comes in. Platform thinking goes deeper than adding AI tools to your existing operations. You're transforming how members interact with your cornered resources.
Static content becomes dynamic interaction. Instead of publishing a report that sits on your website, you deploy an AI knowledge agent that lets members query your entire content library in natural language. The value isn't the report. It's instant access to answers drawn from 30 years of institutional knowledge.
Annual benchmarking becomes real-time research. Instead of producing a benchmarking study once a year, you build a research agent that can marry your internal association data with external sources. Members ask questions and get answers when they need them, not when your publication schedule allows.
One-way content delivery becomes two-sided platform dynamics. Individual members get value. Their employers get value. Partners and vendors get value. Each side's participation makes the platform more valuable to the others.
This is how you take Network Economies and Cornered Resource and actually compound them instead of watching them erode.
The Strategic Question
Here's what I took away from those conversations in Baltimore.
The question facing association boards isn't "should we invest in AI?" Most have moved past that. The question is: what are we investing toward?
Are you investing in content production? Or in infrastructure that compounds?
Are you building a better hub that members visit occasionally? Or a platform they can't operate without?
The associations that figure this out will be in a fundamentally different competitive position. They'll have taken their existing strategic advantages and made them stronger. The ones that don't will watch those advantages slowly slip away.
The snowstorm meant fewer people in the room last week. But maybe that led to the conversations we actually needed to have.
This is part of our "Strategic Window" series on AI investment for associations. Previously: "The 10% Framework: A New Way to Think About Association Reserves." Coming next, "The Secret Cyborg Problem: Why Your Association's AI Gains Are Stuck at 10-20%."
For the complete framework and supporting research, download our white paper: "The Window Is Open: A Framework for Deploying Association Reserves into AI Transformation."
About the Author
Johanna Kasper Snider is the CEO of Blue Cypress. Blue Cypress is building the AI ecosystem that helps associations transform how they serve members—with a bold goal of making associations as powerful as Fortune 500 companies by 2030. The Blue Cypress family includes AI products like Betty, Izzy, rasa.io, Skip and SoundPost; services companies Cimatri, Elastik Teams, and Tasio; Sidecar for AI education; and Blue Cypress Consulting for strategic transformation. BC Labs incubates and launches new AI solutions for associations. Johanna has over a decade of experience in SaaS and professional services, holds a BA and MBA from Tulane University, and is a contributor to "Ascend: Unlocking the Power of AI for Associations."