Communities are one of the few concepts in the world that truly align interests and help people socialize worldwide. But Artificial Intelligence has hardly touched this industry beyond content personalization – and this will change in the Generative AI era.

Many communities use Community Platform as a Service (CPaaS) tools or existing social media platforms than building apps from scratch. These CPaaS tools may not come with AI capabilities, and if they do, it is not at par with mature social media platforms.

Generative AI technology will increase Artificial Intelligence’s penetration into how communities operate.

I researched and found 5 use cases of Generative AI adoption by communities in various capacities. Tomorrow’s community tools and platforms can get inspiration from these to design AI strategies for their products.

How Generative AI improves workflows for community managers

Community managers have a lot of manual and creative work to do. Generative AI tools or ChatGPT can help them reduce mundane tasks like:

User Onboarding

AI chatbots or assistants can take up the task of onboarding new members of the community. Since Generative AI is making chatbots capable of delivering human-like conversations, it can effectively replace the onboarding workflows for community managers. This includes sensitive onboarding workflows like Know-Your-Customer or ID verifications too.

Effective moderation

Earlier, social networks and communities depended on members to report unauthorized behavior. Mass reporting of a user’s account was the key sign to limit their reach or ban them.

With Generative AI, it is possible to automatically analyze post or comment sentiments, and know if they follow community guidelines. For example, Reddit has implemented Artificial Intelligence to help them identify potential behavior that requires their attention as per their community guidelines.

Content creation

Generative AI can analyze your community posts and help you generate new content. It can also repurpose user-generated content into posts or tweets.

Read – how to repurpose webinar into other content formats using ChatGPT.

Improve social listening

Generative AI can also analyze community posts and help your brand figure out what the community seeks. It can identify issues raised, feature requests, or analyze overall brand sentiment.

Community engagement

Generative AI tools or community management platforms can help community managers to personalize content feeds without code like social media sites.

Traditionally, community members have to manually seek information from the community. Generative AI will help them get what they want instantly than search in chronological order.

OverflowAI by Stack Overflow – using Generative AI to improve the search of user-generated data

Stack Overflow recently announced OverflowAI – its Generative AI feature that helps its users interact and extract community knowledge from its 58 million answers. This means developers across the world can now get answers faster, search better, and even generate custom content from Stack Overflow’s user-generated content.

OverflowAI will improve the content consumption experience at the Stack Overflow platform majorly around search. This is a great use case for the adoption of Generative AI in community platforms or Community management software.

Earlier, the search worked based on keywords used. Communities deal with huge amounts of user-generated data – and it is not easy to search merely based on keywords. Now, Stack Overflow will use semantic search which enables users to interact with the platform using a chat interface. Users can access a vast repository of 58 million answers by asking questions.

It will also assist in drafting questions to ask the community. It will also help draft follow-up questions in a chat interface to help you research better with the community.

Stack Overflow is also coming up with a dedicated AI community for discussions and knowledge sharing.

Slack GPT for Slack communities

Slack hosts many companies and B2B communities worldwide – and it too is jumping on the Generative AI bandwagon. Here are 3 ways in which it is implementing Generative AI on its platform:

• Direct LLM Integrations: Slack will allow businesses and communities to integrate their custom language models or choose existing ones (OpenAI or Anthropic) for their use cases.
• In-built features: Slack will release features that help in summarization, writing messages, or drafting documents. It will also enable developers using Slack’s workflow builder to add Generative AI prompts in their steps. You can design Slack automation workflows for community management and engage your members via Generative AI experiences.
• App integrations: Slack will also collaborate with existing AI tools to seamlessly integrate their features with Slack’s ecosystem. For example, its new Einstein GPT app helps you integrate with Salesforce Customer 360 to surface customer insights powered by AI.

Generative AI for governments – Jugalbandi chatbot for Indian villagers

Generative AI will become a critical technology for various local communities across the world to access government benefits or participate in governance.

A brilliant example is the use of a WhatsApp chatbot called ‘Jugalbandi’ in the Biwan village of Haryana, India. The app comprehends multiple spoken or typed languages and local dialects, performs the tasks, and delivers the output back in the local language or dialect. Villagers can perform important tasks like applying for pensions, accessing government benefits, knowing more about university scholarships, etc. The app enables technology-averse people while also saving time in navigating internet search results.

India has 22 official languages and more than 700 dialects – which makes it a perfect sandbox to test Generative AI for translation use cases.

Such translation use cases can also be applied by social media platforms or global digital communities to improve the user’s experience and increase inclusivity.

How Meta is using Generative AI across its social media platforms

Mark Zuckerberg has revealed plans to adopt generative AI across Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and Metaverse as flagship features. A majority of it lies in easing content creation for users, improving engagement, and enabling advertisers with more tools.

For example, a user can use text-based prompts to modify their Images before sharing them on Instagram.

Recently, it released ‘Personas’ – Meta’s AI-enabled chatbots having 30 unique personalities. It’s aim is to improve user retention and increase engagement. The chatbots would provide personalized recommendations, explain Meta services, help compose reply messages, and much more. Snapchat already provides such engagement channels on its app.

It also plans to enable other businesses to use its tools for better customer servicing, especially across WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. They are also going to enable Generative AI tools for advertisers to create multiple versions of ads.

Meta’s progress gives us a glimpse of how Generative AI will impact social media and communities which thrive on them today.

Integrating Generative AI tools and apps into Discord communities

Discord is one of the popular platforms to host communities, especially in B2C tech spaces like gaming, crypto, startups, etc. With the release of ChatGPT, many community managers wanted to implement it to boost engagement – and Alexander is also one such Discord admin.

He documents in his LinkedIn article about using a Generative AI Discord engagement tool called SmartBot.

It has helped him introduce below engagement models for his Discord community:

• Generate images: members can prompt to get desired images that better reflect what’s on their mind than mere emojis or GIFs
• Summarize voice messages: it’s annoying to listen to long voice messages. You have Smartbot now for summarizing them to receive context and respond instantly!
• Conduct discussions in the local language: the bot can support multiple international languages that ChatGPT itself supports.

As ChatGPT becomes better with each update, many such bots will get developed that would enable Discord communities to improve their engagement metrics.

How dating apps like Tinder is using AI tools for improved user engagement

If you are an active user of dating apps – you must have encountered the pressure to present yourself to the community. From profile photos to captions, Tinder knows its users face an issue in creating their profile.

At present, Tinder uses AI in its matching algorithm and to showcase the best photos to your potential matches. It plans to move a step ahead where it will use AI tools to help you write bios or pick the best photos from your collection to eliminate ‘dating awkwardness’.

Bumble uses AI to detect unsolicited pictures and fake profile behavior from their app community. Apps like Flamme have a Generative AI assisted ‘Ask me Anything’ section to help users resolve dating queries and seek advice. Teaser AI can imitate a potential match, and the user can speak with them before choosing to swipe right or left on them!

How are you using Generative AI for your community?

We would love to feature your Generative AI for community management use case on this blog post – email to content@merrative.com

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