Smarter AI: The Community-Powered Search Assistant

If you’re wondering how associations can tap into their unique expertise using AI, this episode of The Member Engagement Show is a must-listen. To coincide with the release of Higher Logic’s AI Search Assistant, I sat down with Aaron Novelle, Senior Product Manager at Higher Logic, to discuss Higher Logic’s purpose-built AI enhancements.

For Higher Logic, it’s not about flashy technology just for the sake of chasing a trend. It’s about making it easier to deliver member value.

AI with Insight: The Power of Tapping Association Expertise with AI

Generic AI models (like ChatGPT) can answer a lot—but when it comes to the specific needs of association members, AI isn’t the expert. You are. Your association has spent time and resources developing deep expertise in your industry. If you have an online community, your members have also created countless discussions full of highly relevant knowledge.

So, although it might be easier for people to ask ChatGPT a question and get a direct answer, when it comes to specialized fields, those answers have a high likelihood of being incomplete or wrong.

Not to mention, there’s an increasing chance of AI outputs being corrupted. With the proliferation of AI-generated content flooding the internet, we’re seeing what some data researchers have called “Hapsburg AI” – when AI consumes an increasing amount of AI-generated content to inform it’s model, you start to get more and more bad outputs because of data “inbreeding.”

“In this environment, associations have the opportunity to be these bastions of knowledge again,” says Aaron. “Associations have long provided connections and knowledge, but with Google that knowledge became more widely propagated. But now, associations offer these repositories of safe understanding in a world that really needs humans in the loop. Because otherwise who is going to tell ChatGPT that it’s absolutely wrong about a complex electronic spec or some nuance of a specialized field…By using something like Higher Logic Thrive, associations can share their expertise with AI in a safe and controlled fashion, and give that information to members in a secure way that demonstrates the value-add of your organization.”

Why Add AI to Your Online Community?

So, your association has a huge collection of expertise, community discussions, and resources. Why add an AI Search Assistant to the mix?

For starters, it makes it easier for members in your online community to find what they’re looking for and get their questions answered. That’s why AI chatbots have become so popular – they provide direct answers in a conversational format. So when you combine AI with your online community and vetted content, you get the best of both worlds: easy answers, based on your specific expertise and trustworthy information.

“A lot of people are familiar with LLMs and AI chatbots. But Higher Logic is really focusing on a specific facet of this technology rather than just chasing the crowd,” says Aaron. “By using Resource Augmented Generation (RAG), the we’re able to utilize resources that are not commonly available on the greater web where those regular LLMs are trained, meaning our AI Search Assistant can give answers that are specific and nuanced to the organization using it…When we install the AI Search Assistant for our customers, it indexes their data and content and provides answers solely based on those trustworthy resources. And the data is entirely insulated, which means associations can feel secure knowing their data is safe from being utilized in a large company’s training model.”

How Does Higher Logic’s AI Search Assistant Work?

On the episode, Aaron explains how Higher Logic’s AI Search Assistant is an advanced search tool that helps community members quickly find relevant information. It uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a modern way of searching that retrieves documents from content contributed to the community and presents answers in a conversational format.

Traditional search engines return a list of documents based on keywords, leaving you to sift through them. RAG works by retrieving the most relevant documents and generating a summarized response while citing the sources. This means you get direct answers with references to the original content.

Key Features of Higher Logic’s AI Search Assistant

• Human Collaboration: If the assistant cannot fully address a query, it prompts users with our “Ask Your Fellow Humans” feature, inviting members to engage with the community by drafting a discussion post, facilitating human interaction and collective problem-solving.
• Data Privacy and Security: The chatbot is powered by Azure OpenAI or IBM watsonx, which have industry leading security measures in place. This helps ensure that every request is processed securely and guarantees that the AI does not learn from your questions or the content that was contributed to the community. In other words, your associations data is kept private; it’s not training some unknown LLM.
• References and Credit: When the chatbot retrieves relevant documents for the community, it will provide references to the original sources. This ensures transparency and allows members to see where the information comes from.
• You get to name it! This is more of a fun feature, but it also helps you tie the AI chatbot to your brand identity. You decide what to call the AI Search Assistant chatbot within your community.
• (Bonus) Bulk Upload and AI-Tagging: The more content the AI Search Assistant has to pull from, the better it can answer members’ questions. Aaron pointed out that our existing Bulk Upload and AI-Suggested Tagging can help you get more content into your community and organize it so that AI can index it. And we continuously improve and refine those features!

Built-In Guardrails for Peace of Mind

We know that one of the most important things for associations is member trust. Aaron walks through how Higher Logic’s AI features are built to help organizations feel comfortable and secure when testing and turning them on.

• You have the option to individually turn on or off our current and future AI features, (this currently include AI Search & Assistant and Library Bulk Upload with AI).
• You set who can see/use AI features, meaning you can choose a specific security group or subset of your users to test AI features before rolling them out to your membership. That way you can make sure that all your decision makers have full confidence in a feature before you decide to turn it on.
• Again, our AI tools are not training an LLM. The AI does notstore or reuse your member data or content beyond surfacing it in the specific response it generates in the moment. It functions just like a search engine that pulls up relevant posts but does not retain any information afterward.
• The AI is prevented from answering questions it doesn’t have sources for – so it won’t make up information or pull from the wider internet if it doesn’t have a trusted source.
• While RAG improves accuracy by pulling from real sources, mistakes can happen. So there is a statement incorporated in the AI Search Assistant indicating that its responses are AI-generated and acknowledging that it can make mistakes. And if you notice incorrect information, you can report it to us at and we will review and refine the chatbot’s knowledge base to improve future searches.
• Organizations can set their own content weighting, placing different value on different types of content to give the AI more context for which content it should pull from first. For example, an organization might weight blogs as slightly less valuable than discussion posts, or their certification program’s body of knowledge. This allows organizations to nudge the AI in the best direction.

Future AI Enhancements from Higher Logic

Higher Logic is hard at work building even more functionality into our AI tools. Aaron shared a sneak peek into some of the AI enhancements coming soon:

• We’re building a transcription tool into the community so that images and videos can be transcribed. That enables both better indexing and, from an accessibility standpoint, allows organizations automatically generate transcripts their videos – even in other languages.
• We’re building a retroactive tool. This would particularly help organizations that have been with Higher Logic for, say, a decade or more and have a jungle of content that needs to be organized. Retroactive tagging would enable organizations to go through and tag thousands of documents in minutes rather than the weeks.
• In the very near future we’re releasing AI Search Agents. These take the power of the broad agent that we already have and allow organizations to focus it in on specific areas via an embeddable widget. So, for example, you could tell it to only look within a certain community or only look at a specific library. You could have a certification agent or a journal agent or an events agent.
• We’re adding an ‘additional instructions’ field to give admins additional control over the AI agents. If you’re familiar with AI, it’s effectively built off of a very long prompt that tells the AI exactly how it should be responding. Via the ‘additional instructions,’ admins will be able to add to that prompt to tailor it to their community’s needs. You could tell it to phrase its answers in a specific language or tone, focus itself in a scientific nature, look only at sources that would provide certification assistance, keep itself to a certain length, even translate itself into another language. The possibilities are near endless.

Aaron phrased it excellently, so I’ll share the vision in his own words: “We’re designing everything to be a broad toolbox for our customers to be able to utilize in the way that they feel is best for their community… We’re looking to build an entire ecosystem that you can utilize to best serve your needs. Be it searching, event management, admin management, member support. These are all things that we’re looking at building in the next year to really take the Higher Logic platform into the future and build an experience that everybody is going to be benefiting from.”

Get the Powerful AI Search Assistant Now

Higher Logic’s AI Search Assistant is entirely free to all our Higher Logic Thrive Community and Platform customers, as well as our original Higher Logic Online Community products. “We really want to bring this in as a standard,” says Aaron. “Our CEO, Rob Wenger, is very much an AI evangelist. He believes this is how the entire world is going to work and we want this available to our customers as part of our core platform rather than as an add-on.”

AI is just becoming part of the digital environment that associations and their members exist in. You can’t ignore it, but you can use it in a way that incorporates trust, reliability, and security.

“It’s important for associations to approach AI safely, but I want to stress that associations should not avoid AI altogether, says Rob. “I’d even go so far as to say, associations that delay AI adoption risk irrelevance. We’re at a turning point, and the longer you wait, the harder it gets to catch up. The future of member engagement, and many jobs, will be powered by AI — and that future is already here. Every day you delay using AI, you’re missing opportunities to connect with your members in smarter, more strategic ways. You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight – but standing still isn’t an option. Start small, start smart – but start now.”

To learn more about our AI Search Assistant, listen to the full podcast episode with Aaron, check out our FAQ’s, and see Aaron’s demo that shows customers how to turn it on and how it can work in their community.