Stronger Together? The Need For Human-AI Collaboration In Digital Community Management

The increasing use of AI in digital community management offers remarkable efficiency and automation possibilities — with capabilities far beyond what human teams can achieve in terms of the number of conversations and amount of data analyzed and processed. However, the role of the digital community manager has not been eliminated. Human involvement remains crucial, especially in scenarios that demand nuance, understanding, and empathy — areas where AI, despite its impressive communication abilities, still falls short.

As AI transforms the way digital communities are managed, striking the right balance between automated task handling and direct human involvement becomes a critical aspect of how companies engage with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders — requiring a strategic approach to capitalize on both AI and human potential.

In this 5-minute read, we’ll explore:

How digital community management has evolved over time
Where AI tools can add immediate value for community managers
Why the human touch is still crucial to user engagement
The importance of balancing automation and human involvement
How the role of the digital community manager is changing

The changing face of digital community management

Over the last 20 years, digital community management has undergone a gradual transition from manual processes to automated systems, and now, to more intelligent AI-driven approaches. In the past, tasks like monitoring discussions, responding to queries, and managing community engagement were done manually, but as online communities grew, this quickly became untenable from a cost and labor management perspective, except in smaller, niche cases.

The arrival of specialized software enabled digital community managers to preschedule posts, implement rules-based moderation, and automate the analysis and reporting process — allowing them to spend more time on strategy and less on execution. However, as an article by Hootsuite pointed out, the drawback was that overuse of automated tools proved to be a turnoff for users — especially the use of bots to follow accounts, post repetitive comments and saturate communities with advertising links — reducing the quality of the experience.

Now, AI-powered community management tools have entered the picture — making automation much smarter. Today’s AI tools are capable of generating genuinely useful content, crafting intelligent responses, and understanding sentiment — able to make tailored and relevant contributions to a community in a way that the previous generation of software could not. As AI continues to evolve, it is poised to become an integral component of digital community management, reshaping how online interactions and engagements are handled.

Understanding AI’s strengths in community management

AI technologies offer significant potential to revolutionize digital community management, providing a wide range of functionalities to manage and enhance online interactions. Currently, the use of AI tools in this context centers around five key areas:

Creation: Tools such as ChatGPT or MidJourney can help content creators to develop, remix, or repurpose content quickly and cost-effectively — making it easy to ensure a constant stream of creative, original and relevant content to attract and engage community members.

Publication: AI solutions can intelligently curate, schedule, and publish content to digital communities — either by integrating with internal systems to push out new company videos, press releases, or product notifications or by pulling together interesting content from the wider web.

Interaction: AI tools can interact directly and conversationally with users, via chatbots, forums, or posts, offering personalized replies based on the user’s history and preferences, supplying additional information or guidance, and ensuring timely and consistent responses.

Moderation: Unlike older solutions, AI tools can moderate conversations intelligently, for example, rather than relying on a keyword blacklist to identify abusive content, they can use natural language processing to judge whether a post or comment might be harmful — even if it doesn’t contain “banned” words.

Analysis: Real-time AI analysis can track community trends, interactions, and sentiment, providing digital community managers with actionable insights into how to adapt their strategy to maximize engagement with users, and detailed reporting on the evolution and direction of the community.

These types of tasks represent a significant proportion of the work once done exclusively by humans. However, while the role of human managers has changed in response, they are by no means redundant — in fact, the unique expertise and insight that experienced digital community managers offer are crucial in a range of scenarios.

The indispensable human element

Despite the advanced capabilities of today’s AI solutions, the human element remains crucial — empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking remain essential to maintaining engaging and effective digital communities. This is especially important in situations that require a deep comprehension of context, cultural nuances, and emotional subtleties.

It’s important that users know the difference. With the increasing adoption of AI tools in content creation, social media interactions, and community moderation, companies should be transparent about how these solutions are deployed. As a recent post by SEO Vendor recommends, “Clearly, letting users know when they’re interacting with an AI tool fosters trust through honesty about your use of technology.”

Sometimes, human oversight is not just advisable, it’s imperative. For example, in scenarios involving conflict resolution within a community — for example, a disagreement between two influential users — human managers are better equipped to understand the underlying issues and navigate the complexities of interpersonal dynamics to reach a compromise or consensus.

Another example is the handling of commercially sensitive topics — for example, a brand reputation crisis — where the potential damage from mishandling communications could have far-reaching consequences for the business. Here, human input is vital to understanding the nuance required in responding to challenging and multifaceted questions.

Human empathy is also vital to identifying and responding to users exhibiting emotional difficulty — where the subtle signs that an individual may be experiencing serious issues that require prompt and personal intervention might not be understood by an AI language model.

Where AI does add value is in creating the space needed for community managers to devote more time and energy to these special cases, by reducing the amount of routine and repetitive work they need to manage daily. The key for managers is to understand the capabilities and limitations of the AI solutions they use in detail, ensuring they can divide the workload appropriately and effectively for the best outcomes.

Facilitating effective human/AI collaboration

AI is well-suited for tasks such as data analysis, trend prediction, and handling routine queries — areas where speed, consistency, and the ability to process large volumes of information are key. On the other hand, tasks that involve complex decision-making, empathy, and creative content creation may be better left to community managers — although they may use AI tools to support their work.

For effective collaboration, companies must have processes in place to delineate what aspects of a digital community manager’s role can be fully assigned to an AI system, what areas can be partly automated but with human oversight, and what tasks should only be handled personally. Where to draw the line will depend on the culture, sector, size, and purpose of the community — and may change over time — but it’s vital to have clear policies to avoid misunderstandings or inconsistencies between different teams.

Of course, AI is continually evolving and developing new capabilities — and part of the role of digital community managers is to guide how that evolution happens to better align with their objectives. Companies using a custom AI as part of their community management strategy can train it on their own data and insights to make it more capable of dealing with tasks specific to their community. In fact, as software engineer Miroslaw Shpak revealed on Medium, they can even use existing AI solutions to help train their own AI — as he puts it, “An AI training another AI … using a human as mediator”

Future trends in digital community management

It’s clear that as AI technologies continue to evolve, they will take on more sophisticated roles, handling complex interactions with greater autonomy — and the distinction between human and AI inputs will become increasingly blurred. Human community managers will need to develop specialist skills to manage these advanced systems, blending technical expertise with an understanding of human psychology and community dynamics.

The role of AI in community management will continue to expand, but not necessarily at the expense of human involvement. Instead, the focus will be on creating more intuitive, responsive AI systems that work in tandem with human managers. This collaboration will be central to ensuring digital communities are managed efficiently, empathetically, and creatively. Companies should look to invest not only in AI technologies but also in developing the human expertise needed to oversee these evolving digital ecosystems.

One emerging trend is the outsourcing of digital community management to specialist teams equipped with the knowledge and tools to harness the full potential of AI solutions. These teams can offer a balanced approach, leveraging AI for operational efficiency while ensuring that the human element remains at the forefront of community engagement and decision-making.

Conclusion

As AI tools become more capable, taking on a larger share of the work involved in digital community management, the human touch nevertheless remains essential, especially for the most complex and potentially sensitive interactions. While the division of labor is constantly changing, with AI solutions capable of handling increasingly sophisticated tasks, the nuanced understanding, empathy, and creativity that humans bring to the table remains invaluable.

Digital community managers looking to strike the right balance between technological advancement and human insight need to both invest in the right AI solutions but also nurture the human skills necessary to guide and complement these technologies. Partners like SourceCX can provide invaluable support in navigating this balance, combining the technical knowledge needed to take full advantage of the benefits of AI, with round-the-clock human input available to deal with more challenging scenarios.

As the lines between human and AI contributions blend, the future of digital community management will be defined by our ability to leverage the best of both worlds, ensuring communities are not just efficiently managed but also genuinely engaged and nurtured.