Ernie Svenson made an observation in our recent Sidecar Sync podcast conversation that should give association leaders pause.
Ernie is a former New Orleans litigator who left Big Law nearly two decades ago and now runs a membership community for solo and small firm lawyers. He's spent years teaching attorneys how to use technology to streamline their practices, first with paperless workflows and now with AI.
Bar associations, he noted, have the largest, longest-running repositories of useful information in the legal profession. Decades of publications, research, guidance, and practitioner knowledge. And yet his three-year-old membership community for solo and small firm lawyers is delivering more perceived value to members on a daily basis.
The difference has nothing to do with the quality of content. It has everything to do with accessibility.
About six months ago, Ernie added an AI chatbot to his community platform. Suddenly, members could query years of content in natural language and get answers in seconds, any time of day. No searching through archives. No hoping the right keyword pulls up the right document. Just a question and an answer, with links to the source material if they want to go deeper.
Associations are sitting on gold mines. The problem is that members need a pickaxe to get to them.
The Accessibility Gap
Most associations have invested heavily in content over the years. Journals and publications. Conference session recordings. Research reports and white papers. Standards and guidelines. Archived webinars. The cumulative knowledge is substantial, often representing the most authoritative information available in a given profession.
But the delivery mechanisms haven't kept pace with how people expect to find information now.
That content typically lives in PDF archives that require downloading and manual searching. It sits in member portals with search functions that demand precise keywords. It's scattered across siloed sections of websites that members may not even know exist. The knowledge is there. The friction is the problem.
Ernie made this point in our conversation: even when resources are technically online, if accessing them requires the right search terms and multiple clicks through nested pages, you've already lost the comparison to tools that simply answer the question. Members don't grade on a curve. They compare your resources to whatever else is available, and right now, whatever else is available tends to be faster.
Why Smaller Players Are Winning
Ernie's community runs on Circle, and he's been building it for about three years. That means courses, presentations, discussions, and video programming—useful content, but a fraction of what a legacy professional association has accumulated.
When Circle introduced an AI chatbot feature, he decided to try it. The chatbot was trained on his community's content, and members could now ask questions in plain language instead of hunting through archives.
The results were immediate. Members get intelligible answers about 95% of the time, according to Ernie. The chatbot is available around the clock without requiring any staff effort per query. And responses include links to source material so members can verify or explore further.
He's not winning because his content is better than what bar associations have. He's winning because his content is accessible in the way members actually want to access it. Three years of material, made queryable, is beating thirty years of archives that require effort to navigate.
The Hidden Benefit: Seeing What Members Actually Want
Beyond answering questions, Ernie mentioned something that adds another layer of value. His platform lets him see the AI inbox—a log of every question members have asked the chatbot.
This gives him visibility into what members are actually wondering about. He can see where the chatbot gave a weak or incomplete answer, which tells him when to jump in personally. He can spot gaps in his content that he should fill. The feedback loop is continuous.
This kind of intelligence doesn't exist when resources are static. When members have to dig through archives on their own, you never see the questions they gave up on. You don't know what they searched for, failed to find, and then sought elsewhere. But when they can ask freely and you can see those queries, you learn what actually matters to them in real time.
That insight is valuable beyond member service. It can shape programming decisions, content strategy, and product development. You stop guessing what members need and start seeing it directly.
What It Takes to Close the Gap
The technology to do this exists now and doesn't require building something from scratch. Knowledge assistants and AI chatbots can be trained on existing content libraries. Several platforms offer this functionality, and the barrier to entry is lower than many association leaders assume.
The shift does require some groundwork. Content needs to be consolidated into formats that can be ingested by an AI tool, which may mean moving beyond scattered PDFs and siloed web pages. You'll need to choose or build a tool that can query that content in natural language. There are decisions to make about what content is queryable and what stays gated. And monitoring the questions members ask will help improve both the AI responses and the underlying content over time.
This approach doesn't replace human expertise. It makes existing expertise findable. The goal is for a member to be able to ask a question at 10 PM and get a useful, sourced answer without waiting for staff to log on the next morning.
The Opportunity Cost of Waiting
Every month that association content stays locked behind friction, members are building habits elsewhere. They're learning to go to ChatGPT first. They're asking questions on Reddit and getting fast answers from peers. They're following industry influencers who package insights in accessible formats.
Those habits are hard to reverse once they're formed. If members don't think of your association as the place to get quick, practical answers, they won't suddenly start thinking that way just because you've always had good content buried somewhere.
Associations have a window right now to become the go-to source in their domain. The path isn't creating more content. It's making existing content accessible in ways that match how members actually look for information.
The risk here isn't that associations will be disrupted by AI companies. It's that they'll be outpaced by smaller, nimbler players who move faster on accessibility. Ernie's community is proof of this. You don't need the biggest library to win. You need the most usable one.
The Investment You've Already Made
Associations have spent decades building expertise, curating knowledge, and serving as authoritative voices in their professions. That investment doesn't evaporate because AI chatbots exist. If anything, the depth and quality of association content becomes more valuable when it can be surfaced instantly.
But that value stays theoretical if members can't access it when and how they need it.
The question isn't whether to build more content. Most associations already have more than enough. The question is whether to finally make the content you have work harder for the members who are already paying for it.
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