One in four US doctors now uses OpenEvidence, an AI platform trained exclusively on peer-reviewed medical journals. That's 15 million consultations every month, with physicians asking clinical questions and receiving evidence-based answers with citations in real time.
The platform is free for verified medical professionals. And it achieved viral growth in healthcare—an industry notorious for slow technology adoption.
What made the difference? The AI only learns from vetted sources like the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. Not the general internet. Not Reddit threads. Not content farms optimized for search rankings. Just the trusted, peer-reviewed knowledge that physicians actually need.
For association leaders, this story raises an important question: What's the value of the specialized knowledge you're sitting on, and who should be building AI products with it?
Why Generic AI Falls Short for Professionals
Professionals don't want advice that's mostly correct. They need the right answer.
Lawyers learned this the hard way. When ChatGPT first launched, a widely reported case involved an attorney who filed a pleading citing case law that didn't exist. The AI had hallucinated it. The lawyer faced serious professional consequences. And while AI has improved significantly since then, the underlying lesson remains: in high-stakes professional contexts, "pretty good" isn't good enough.
This is exactly why legal professionals are drawn to AI tools built specifically for legal work—platforms with access to verified case law databases, in partnership with established legal research providers, that can guarantee results are properly grounded.
The same dynamic plays out across medicine, engineering, accounting, and every other field where getting it wrong carries real consequences. The narrower and more specialized the knowledge base, the more valuable and trustworthy the AI becomes.
This flips conventional thinking about domain expertise. Associations sometimes worry that their narrow focus limits their reach or relevance. In the AI era, that narrowness might be your greatest competitive advantage.
The Cornered Resource You're Sitting On
There's a concept in business strategy called a "cornered resource"—an asset that you and only you have access to. Combined with strong brand authority in a specific domain, it creates a foundation for real competitive power.
Many associations hold exactly this position. Your peer-reviewed journals. Your research archives. Your credentialing content and exam materials. Your conference proceedings. Your practice guidelines and professional standards. This is the raw material for domain-specific AI that professionals will actually trust.
The professionals in your field aren't looking for generic answers they could get anywhere. They want guidance grounded in the authoritative sources of your discipline. And you control those sources.
Path One: Partnering with Content Aggregators
Companies like OpenEvidence represent one path forward. Their model works like this: they raise significant venture capital, then approach primary content providers—associations, journal publishers, research institutions—with licensing proposals.
The pitch is straightforward. They'll pay you upfront and through ongoing licensing fees. They'll train their AI on your content. You share in the benefits, whether through revenue sharing or simply the exposure and reach their platform provides.
For associations already in content-sharing arrangements with major publishers, this may feel familiar. You're essentially extending an existing model into the AI era.
The advantages are real. Speed to market is dramatically faster than building something yourself. You benefit from the aggregator's investment in AI infrastructure, user experience, and distribution. And for organizations whose content licensing terms are already complex, adding another channel may be relatively straightforward.
When you have a platform like Open Evidence anchored by prestigious journals, you're part of something that can achieve scale quickly. The network effects benefit everyone involved. Physicians get multidisciplinary insights spanning many specialties, and your content reaches professionals who might never have encountered it otherwise.
Path Two: Building Your Own Solution
The alternative is standing up your own proprietary knowledge assistant. This keeps you in complete control of your intellectual property and creates a direct value exchange with your members.
The advantages here are different but equally real. You own the full relationship with your users. You control how your content is used, how it's presented, and what data you collect about how professionals engage with it. You capture the revenue directly rather than through a share. And you never face a situation where your content is under someone else's control.
This path requires more effort upfront. You'll need to evaluate technology partners or potentially build custom solutions. You'll need to invest in the user experience and in driving adoption among your members. It's not trivial.
But it creates something that's entirely yours—a knowledge resource that reinforces your position as the authoritative voice in your domain, with no dependency on a third party's business decisions or strategic direction.
Making the Decision: What to Consider
Neither path is inherently right or wrong. The choice depends on your organization's circumstances, capabilities, and strategic priorities. What matters is approaching the decision with a clear framework rather than jumping at the first opportunity that presents itself.
Start by understanding what you have. Your content is a particularly valuable resource for the next phase of AI development. That's precisely why well-funded companies want access to it. Before entering any conversation about licensing or partnerships, make sure you fully grasp the strategic value of what you're bringing to the table.
Consider the one-way door question. Some decisions are easily reversible; others aren't. Once your content has been used to train an AI system, the situation is different than before. Yes, contracts include termination clauses. Yes, legal protections exist. But as a practical matter, unwinding these arrangements can be complicated. Think carefully about whether you're comfortable with that.
Evaluate your current content relationships. If you already work with a major publisher who controls significant aspects of your content distribution, your practical options may be different than an association that owns its IP outright. Your starting point shapes what paths are realistically available.
Think about your audience definition. One of the opportunities in the AI era is reaching beyond your traditional membership boundaries. Associations tend to define themselves narrowly around specific professional designations. But your expertise often has value to a much broader audience.
Consider accounting associations that focus exclusively on certified CPAs. The number of licensed CPAs is actually a fairly small fraction of everyone working in accounting roles—and an even smaller fraction of people in the broader finance discipline. An association's knowledge could serve all of these audiences, establishing authority and creating pathways to membership or premium offerings. Strategic openness about who you serve doesn't mean giving away your crown jewels. It means casting a wider net while protecting what makes you irreplaceable.
The Question You Need to Answer
Domain-specific AI requires exactly what associations have: deep expertise in a defined field, authoritative content, and the trust of professionals who practice in that space.
The question isn't whether your knowledge has value in the AI era. It clearly does. The question is whether you'll leverage that value yourself, partner with others to bring it to market, or watch while someone else figures out how to monetize it without you.
Each path has tradeoffs. What matters is making the choice deliberately, with full awareness of what you're holding and what you're deciding to do with it.
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