Your association’s biggest AI opportunity isn’t in the exciting, creative work. It’s in the tasks that make your team want to quit.

After 18 months running Speak About AI and talking with more than 100 event professionals (including dozens from associations), I discovered something: The work everyone hates doing is exactly where you should start with AI.

Think about it. Those mind-numbing tasks like writing the same update five different ways, building yet another timeline from scratch, or analyzing hundreds of survey responses are more than automatable — they’re your highest ROI opportunities.

The Tedium-to-Transformation Framework

Let me share what a veteran event agency owner told me after running her business for over a decade: "I really dreaded the constant proposal creation and all the back-and-forth process via email. During that back and forth via email, phone calls, whatnot, a lot of information gets lost. We’ve had quite a few mistakes through the years, lost a lot of money on that."

Sound familiar? This happens every week across associations. Multiple stakeholders need different versions of the same information. Board members want strategic context. Sponsors need formal updates. Members expect transparency. Vendors require specific deadlines. And here's the thing — internal communications score 9/10 for automation potential not because they’re sophisticated, but because they’re pure information transfer that everyone dreads.

I score every task from zero to 10 on automation readiness. Tasks scoring zero to three either need humans forever (member relationships, strategic vision) or the technology is just still severely lacking (image generation). Tasks scoring four to six are maybe territory where hybrid approaches work. But tasks scoring seven to 10 are a great opportunity for your teams to win some time back. They’re structured, repetitive, and nobody enjoys them. The pattern is clear: High scores correlate with tedium, not complexity.

Your Three Biggest Wins This Week

Data Analysis (Score: 10/10). Post-event surveys are where good intentions go to die. You collect feedback religiously but who has time to analyze 500 responses? Upload your CSV and survey responses before asking AI to identify:

• Top three biggest wins
• Main complaints with the event
• Unexpected member insights
• Next year’s recommendations with data
• One-page board summary

Three days of analysis becomes three hours, where you can analyze both qualitative and quantitative data together. One planner for International Confex discovered certain sessions were underperforming and had significantly lower attendance, so they were able to regroup for the following year and make sure that they scrapped those topics.

Internal Communications (Score: 9/10). Try this prompt right now: “I need to communicate our conference date change from March to May to multiple stakeholders. Create five versions: board (strategic implications and opportunity), sponsors (formal tone emphasizing enhanced value and benefits of new timing), members (enthusiastic about improvements this allows), vendors (specific new deadlines and requirements), staff (detailed logistics and action items).”

One event professional I chatted with from Sweden routinely has to be the liaison between vendors, clients, and other stakeholders for all updates. Using AI, she was able to create streamlined communications, even creating an AI knowledgebase that her clients could reference. That’s over 11 hours monthly back in her pocket from uploading documents and testing a few simple prompts.

When you send the same message to five audiences, you’re not adding value, you’re just reformatting. Let AI handle the reformatting while you focus on the strategy behind the message.

Timeline Generation (Score: 8/10). Remember building that comprehensive event timeline last month? Four hours of your life you’ll never get back? Here’s what actually works: “Create a timeline for our 500-person annual conference on October 15. Include volunteer milestones, sponsor deadlines, registration phases, speaker confirmations, board approvals. Create versions for: executive committee (decisions only), event committee (all tasks), volunteers (their parts), vendors (deliverables).” Alternatively, try out this free custom event planning timeline generator GPT — used by more than 800 event professionals — that walks you through the process.

Just 30 minutes instead of four hours, and it captures everything you learned from last year’s event. After using the timeline generator, one event manager from London told me, “It’s really saved me time on admin, leaving me with more space to do the strategy!”

The Association Multiplier Effect

The goal of AI is to empower staff and reclaim their time for more valuable tasks. Imagine getting to launch three new member programs with the same team, all while having more dedicated time to strategize how to attract more new members to your event.

When you free your team from tedious tasks, you restore purpose. Staff who were drowning in administration suddenly have capacity for strategic initiatives. Board members get clearer updates faster. Members see more value delivered with the same resources.

Look at your task list from last week. Highlight everything that felt tedious: survey data still sitting unanalyzed, meeting notes waiting to become action items, those status emails you wrote multiple times, and the timeline you revised for the third time. That highlighted list? That’s 10-plus hours weekly that could go toward member value.

Your Monday Morning Action Plan

Associations face a brutal reality with declining memberships, rising expectations, and static budgets. You can’t hire your way out of this. But you can automate your way to capability.

Rather than forming another committee or waiting for the perfect strategy to fall into your lap, spend one week replacing all of your Google searches with AI.

If it doesn’t give you the answer you’re looking for, tell it what it got wrong. If you don’t trust the source, ask it for the link. Build the habit of using AI, and you’ll start to better understand what it can accomplish and where its limits are.

Even if it might feel intimidating, start with the tedious tasks, prove the value, and expand systematically. You’ll be surprised by all the new things you can do.