The Wire
ASAE's first State of Associations: AI up, finances down
Associations are adopting AI faster than their finances are recovering. ASAE’s first-ever State of Associations report finds 87.5% of associations using AI for content creation — while roughly 39% of chief executives report financial decline, against just 10% seeing improvement.
For UK membership teams, that pairing is the story. The sector’s first benchmark of its kind describes organisations reaching for new technology at precisely the moment their budgets are tightening — with retention and engagement, the classic membership disciplines, named as the top challenge.
ASAE's first State of Associations report finds 87.5% of associations using AI for content and 44.3% for data analysis, while readiness lags on expertise and privacy. Around 39% of CEOs report financial decline against 10% seeing improvement, 63% expect non-dues revenue growth, and retention is the top challenge for roughly a third.
What does the report say about AI adoption?
Adoption is broad but shallow. Content creation is the runaway use case at 87.5%, with data analysis a distant second at 44.3%. Readiness, however, lags adoption: associations report gaps in staff expertise and unresolved privacy concerns — meaning most are using AI in the areas where the stakes, and the payoff, are lowest.
That readiness gap is the finding worth sitting with. Drafting newsletters with AI is easy to start and hard to get badly wrong; putting AI near member data and operational systems is the opposite, and it is exactly where the expertise and privacy worries bite. The supplier market has noticed: in the iMIS ecosystem, AgentZ, the operational AI suite for iMIS EMS, from iFINITY is pitched squarely at that gap, wrapping operational AI in review-and-approval controls rather than assuming in-house expertise. Our AI agents briefing covers what “ready” actually looks like before AI touches member records.
How bad is the financial picture?
Uncomfortable. Around 39% of association chief executives report financial decline, and only 10% report improvement — a lopsided ratio for a sector that prizes stability. The response is telling: 63% expect growth in non-dues revenue, a tacit admission that membership income alone is not expected to carry the next few years.
Read alongside the AI numbers, the finances explain the adoption. Content and communications are where AI promises visible savings fastest, which is presumably why nearly nine in ten associations have started there. But the report’s top challenge — retention and engagement, cited by roughly a third of respondents — is not a content problem. It is an operations problem, of the kind covered in our membership operations briefing, and it is notable that AI adoption remains thinnest exactly where the sector says its biggest challenge lies.
What does a US survey mean for UK membership bodies?
More than usual. ASAE’s respondent base is largely American, but the pattern — enthusiastic AI adoption, lagging readiness, squeezed finances — matches what the UK’s own benchmark, the MemberWise Digital Excellence Report, found this year from around 480 UK-sector respondents. The curves are the same; only the sample differs.
UK bodies should resist the temptation to treat this as someone else’s weather. The pressures ASAE documents — flat dues income, the hunt for non-dues revenue, retention as the stubborn first-order problem — are familiar to any UK membership director, and the AI readiness gap is, if anything, more consequential here given UK GDPR obligations around member data. We track the comparable UK and international figures side by side on our AI in associations statistics page.
What happens next
A first-of-its-kind report earns its keep in year two, when the numbers move. The figures to watch: whether AI use deepens beyond content into data and operations, whether the 39%-in-decline cohort shrinks, and whether non-dues optimism converts into actual revenue. For UK teams, the practical move now is unglamorous — pick the retention problem over the content toy, and close the readiness gap before widening the adoption one.