A community is a dedicated space where customers connect with each other for ongoing support, learning, and shared identity. For companies, it’s a way to build loyalty, gather real-time insight, and deliver deeper value beyond a product or service.
What sets a community apart from a static knowledge base is the personalized support members receive. While that level of service used to come at a high operational cost, AI makes it easier and more impactful for three solopreneurs who spoke with Business Insider about running their own membership communities.
“I can be even more present inside of my community,” said Gabriela Fiorentino, founder of Nest Earth, a community that helps parents integrate sustainable choices into family life. “It’s like having an assistant without having to pay for the assistant,” she added.
Here’s how three solopreneurs running communities use AI to reduce cognitive and operational load so they can create stronger member experiences.
This article is part of The AI-Powered Solopreneur series. Read more.
AI streamlines personalized offerings
Clara Ma, founder of Ask a Chief of Staff, a community serving executives in chief of staff roles, loves meeting with members one-on-one to answer their personal questions, but only has limited time to do so.
Before, she often found herself on calls repeating generic information that was already available within the community. Now, she asks members to share their questions ahead of calls, then uses the integrated AI in Slack—where her community connects and has conversations—to ask what resources already exist related to those questions.
“I can pull up three to five resources immediately and say, ‘Let’s look at this first, and then if your question still isn’t answered or you want to personalize the chat a little bit more to you, I can do that better because we’re on the same page about what is already available to you,'” Ma said.
She also used Slack Workflows to help her build out an automated process for member onboarding. Based on whether they’re an aspiring chief of staff, a current chief of staff, or a mentor within the community, they get a slightly different and personalized message welcoming them into the community and giving them some next steps on how to engage. This creates a curated experience from day one without a heavy manual lift for Ma. Onboarding tasks now take about an hour per week as opposed to a couple of hours per day before AI, she said.
For Lis Best—founder of Girls Club Collective, a community for impact leaders and entrepreneurs—the biggest value in using AI has been more mental capacity to dedicate to what matters most to her.
“I can use my creative brainpower more on facilitation and on one-on-one member support and less on rewriting an email sequence for the 12th time,” she said.
For instance, she has recently used ChatGPT to help her improve the website positioning and suggest email sequences for potential new members, reducing her time spent on growing her community so she can spend more time engaging with it.
AI offers research-backed strategy suggestions
Beyond one-on-one interactions, community-based businesses also offer broader programming like workshops, expert sessions, and connection opportunities. Ideally, these offerings reflect what members actually want—and AI makes it far easier for solopreneurs to identify those needs at scale.
Before AI, Ma used to rely on intuition or hours of manual work to understand member preferences, reading months of community Slack conversations and trying to mentally catalog themes. Now, AI synthesizes data from member conversations, newsletter open rates, and workshop engagement to inform decisions about which events or member offerings to prioritize.
“It unlocks a lot more information a lot faster so that we can make better decisions,” Ma said. “I used to hem and haw about what programming we should do. Now I have the data, and I can have a conversation with AI to spitball different strategies and topics that I think our members are going to react well to instead of going off gut feeling.”
Best loves that AI gives her the confidence to table ideas that have been on her “maybe” list or that a handful of members have requested. Uploading information from member surveys and member interviews transcribed with the Otter AI notetaker, she can ask ChatGPT to synthesize what offerings are most in demand—and which are not worth spending energy on from a data perspective.
“As a person, I think, ‘I know the four people who are asking for this, so should I do it anyway?'” Best said. AI’s more neutral perspective helps her put those personal feelings aside and choose programming that will benefit the most members.
Fiorentino also uses AI to support broader strategy research. For instance, when trying to brainstorm new ways to monetize, she turned to AI, asking what options were available and what was working for other communities.
For example, she’s launched a new membership tier where service providers can access more visibility and potential clients through her community. She’s also planning to launch a marketplace of eco-friendly products later this year.
AI creates more time for human touchpoints
In case it’s not clear, the goal for these solopreneurs is to use AI to maximize human potential, not replace it.
“I always say AI is for automation, not to replace the human,” said Ma, who coaches her small team of contractors to try automating any task that they do more than five times with AI. This ensures she’s using her limited budget only on things that require human touch, not things that a machine can handle.
And with that extra time, they can work to maximize the potential of their members. “Any time we get back, we try to funnel back into the community in some sort of human touchpoint so that our members really feel taken care of and supported,” Ma shared. “AI is never going to replace the human aspect, which is what makes community so worth it in the first place.”
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