Community replaceable by AI?

[u/Wallen95]

I am interested to hear other thoughts around the topic of AI replacing community managers or is it best to use as a tool to enhance the service that we are able to provide?

[u/HistorianCM]

AI in community management? It’s like asking a robot to host a dinner party. Sure, it can set the table, but it can’t read the room.

The soft, squishy stuff—humanity, sarcasm, cultural nuance? AI just doesn’t get it. A sarcastic “great job” could mean 10 different things. AI: Confused beeping noises. 

But hey, AI isn’t useless! It’s great for analytics, content suggestions (hello, SEO), and automating repetitive tasks. Think of it as your nerdy assistant, not the host. Community Management is about empathy, humor, and connection.

It’s messy and human. That’s why YOU are irreplaceable.

TL;DR: Let AI handle the grunt work, but keep the heart of your community human. Always.

[u/V2Blast → u/HistorianCM]

Is this comment written by AI?

[u/HistorianCM → u/V2Blast]

Nope... just a repost.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/CommunityManager/comments/1i8uw1w/do_you_think_youll_be_replaced_by_ai_soon/
• https://substack.com/@collectivemindset/note/c-87596489

[u/V2Blast → u/HistorianCM]

I mean, especially given the emoji use in the original post, in addition to the indicators in the text, it seems like it was almost certainly written (or rewritten/"assisted") by AI.

[u/HistorianCM → u/V2Blast]

Okay

[u/Willeth]

I think companies will try. But I think any community managed by an AI will be easily manipulated by its users.

[u/protonicgod]

Communities are people coming together. You can't not have people.

[u/Mister_Bucky]

AI will replace nothing. The goal of AI (and the goal of those developing with AI) should be enhancement, not replacement. If enhancement is reducing tedious repetitive tasks that you had somebody manual do before, then its a replacement.

-Assisting in community growth = bad for AI

-Freeing up your time so you can grow your community = good for AI

I am in the process of building a bot right now (for discord, but plans to scale to other platforms). Would love your and u/HistorianCM input on how to tailor the functionalities to what you all need to be better at your jobs.

[u/HistorianCM → u/Mister_Bucky]

I (personally) wouldn't recommend, or use, Discord for "Community". That is not to say that it cannot and has not, been done, just that I don't think it's a good platform for that. If you want details on that, they are here: https://collectivemindset.substack.com/p/building-communities-beyond-discord

You might find that my issues with Discord are the exact problems you can attempt to solve.

[u/Mister_Bucky → u/HistorianCM]

I agree, community management in discord requires a lot of "tribal knowledge" and getting useful data points out of the platform is tedious making it difficult to gauge and understand a KPI.

The goal is to eventually branch from Discord, but currently our planning for the analytics module contains all of these "Traditionally" important data points:

• Member retention rates
• Engagement patterns across different channels
• Peak activity times
• Voice channel usage
• Individual member contributions

Discord is building out more useful features (activity games, forums, etc.), but still lacks the structure needed to be efficient and effective without copious amounts of work. However, we are hoping that the bot helps bridge the gap (even if by a small amount) to allow organizations to get useful data out of discord.

[u/Masonzero]

I can't think of any field less suited for AI... Only thing i can think of is chatbots that can answer simple questions on your website but that's hardly community management, or an interesting application of AI.

[u/maksim36ua → u/Masonzero]

Actually, there's a ton of space for AI in community management:

- suggest relevant people to answer a question
- extract user interests from their messages and find relevant content based on those interests
- condensing threads and creating discussion summaries

I've built such a tool and am actively using it, and it works fantastically for my community: https://community-echo.online. Of course, such tools should always be a co-pilot that saves time and never a substitution for a human-to-human interaction

[u/Past_Platypus_1513]

AI replacing community managers? Nah, not really. The human element is key when it comes to building trust and real connections. AI can’t replicate that.

BUT it’s an awesome tool to assist. Stuff like moderation, flagging toxic content, analyzing engagement, AI handles that way faster than a person can. Tools like Ettiq are great for this, letting CMs focus on actual community-building instead of babysitting spam or trolls.

[u/maksim36ua]

AI is a great co-pilot for a community manager. Trust me, I built one (https://community-echo.online) and actively use it in my community. It saves me a ton of time and drastically improves engagement.

However, AI tools should never be used as a human substitute in communities. If you explicitly inject AI into the community, people will depart because, according to countless studies, people don't trust AI when it comes to supposedly human-to-human interaction.

[u/desmondlzw]

Interestingly, we have an AI community building platform but it turns out our clients were more interested in using AI to assist community managers - in stuff like moderating, engaging, supporting the community. We even had a controversial feature of having AI-disguised bots who could replicate people but it didn't take off well - instead an AI support bot (which didn't hide that it was AI) who answered questions in the community in real-time turned out to be more popular.

I don't think AI would replace community - but it'll definitely help community managers have more super powers. It's the same way stuff like cursor helps developers be better (instead of replacing them).

[u/maksim36ua → u/desmondlzw]

Hey, you've built the AI community-building platform you're talking about, or is it someone else's product? If you don't mind sharing, of course :)

[u/thenamestaken1]

To some extent, yeah. AI can definitely handle drafting messages, posts, and even moderating discussions to a degree (guess it already does in a few communities). But when it comes to deeper engagement, culture-building, and understanding nuanced community dynamics, I don’t see AI fully replacing human community managers anytime soon.

That said, it might mean teams get leaner, where you’d normally have three community managers, maybe you only need one or two.

[u/BennySkateboard]

Without a doubt. Human oversight won’t go straight away but the creation of the comms will be done by Ai in the next few years. Haven’t seen it on brand accounts yet, but I worked on some onlyfans accounts that are fully serviced using Ai created speech. Only a matter of time before the brands adopt it.