The National Contract Management Association (NCMA) is well along on an ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) journey. Its bot for members and nonmembers to interface with the association launched in August. 

“We’ve reduced our inbound call time in the very first month by 11 hours, specifically attributed to this tool,” said CEO Kraig Conrad. “We had almost 700 engagements in the first month where people got their questions answered immediately.” 

Conrad said the bot engaged 3,000 users in August and nearly double that in September. 

But users always have the option to reach a human. In fact, if a website interaction is taking too long, a box will pop up with the relevant phone number to call, he said. 

“Our job isn’t to move people away from human contact,” Conrad said. “I never want to remove the human component of a professional society. We’re about people. It’s just we have different people in different stages in their journey. The younger folks, or even older folks, are more comfortable engaging technology first before they get to a human. But you can always go right to a human if you wish.”

The bot has different “brains” – a collection of information the chatbot uses to answer queries – for members and nonmembers, and even for different levels of membership.

When initiating contact with the site, “based on your level of membership, you will have access to the appropriate amount of content,” Conrad said. “We have (content) that’s for the public, where no one’s logged in and we don’t know where you are.” From there, for every step up in membership, “we just add in the next brain that handles the content your user category has access to.”

Those brains are still in the training stages and users are asked to give feedback to help train them. So far they’ve rated the experience a 3.8 on a five-point scale. To do that well while the bot is still learning is “great,” in Conrad’s view.

The bot was developed with Ivy.ai, a platform created for use in higher education. It provides generative, cited responses to questions. Generative means “I have a usable piece of information; I don’t have to go through 12 documents,” Conrad said.

“We did an RFP process and a solicitation. This was an interesting experience,” Conrad said. “The first three providers we went through, there was a lot of vaporware. They said they could do things, but then when we got down to selecting them and going through it, the experience was different.

“Some of them also modified their terms and conditions,” he said. “They came back and said, ‘Oh, no, if you want to do that, even though it was defined in the RFP, here’s your new terms and conditions, here’s your new price. It’s such a fast-moving space. It is like the Wild West.”

A bot for staff use

Another bot, developed in-house, is designed to help staff draft and edit materials related to NCMA’s core body of knowledge. It is not currently in use and will not gain access to NCMA’s intellectual property until next year, because association leaders are not yet confident their proprietary data will be safe. To build confidence, NCMA will watch, wait and consult with vendors and subject matter experts in the months ahead, Conrad said.

The staff bot is built on a paid version of the OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform rather than on the Ivy.ai platform NCMA is using for member engagement. Proponents of enterprise versions of platforms like ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot say that data entered is not used to make the models smarter for other users, but Conrad needs to be convinced.

“Ivy.ai is wonderful as a contained model, where my content isn’t going to train a bigger brain,” Conrad said. “It only trains … the brain that we engage customers with.”

“But Ivy.ai is not designed to do what ChatGPT would, which is create formats that the AI could use to edit a first draft,” he said. 

Data as the ‘crown jewels’

“This bot is going to be required to do edits,” Conrad said. “A member of staff could be editing a session for a conference. The AI needs to give back the information in the format we want: ‘Edit it this way: sharp, succinct,’ all that sort of stuff. ‘Put the names in the order we want, follow our style guide, but also tag it so that the continuing education credits are aligned right,’” he said.

“I would rather let the machine give us a first crack at it. That means it’s got to have access to my body of knowledge, which is the crown jewel. So, that’s why we’re being very cautious here, because we don’t want to release the crown jewels,” Conrad said. “You can’t get the genie back into the bottle. It’s a huge risk.”

You don’t need to be an IT professional to lead your association into an artificial-intelligence-enabled future. But it might help to be a bit of a nerd and take an interest in the new technology.

“I’m a serious geek, I guess is the best way to say it,” Conrad said.

“I feel it’s important that leadership be out in front of it,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s my day job. I’ve got strategy to worry about, I’ve got board members and all that. But if I can’t help the team see a vision, we will be left behind.”