By Mary Tucker | Senior Communications and Content Manager | IAEE
Generative AI has changed how industry professionals create content, but most people are still only scratching the surface of what it can do. Typing a quick request into a chatbot is easy. Getting it to consistently produce polished, on-brand, ready-to-use content is a different skill entirely.
That’s where the IAEE Master Series Certificate: AI Accelerator, a three-part hands-on training led by Chris Gloede, CAE, Chief Consultant at Ricochet comes into play. Chris has spent his career helping associations modernize their marketing, from leading a membership turnaround as the American Bar Association’s first Chief Marketing Officer to advising executives today through the Association Academy. In this webinar series, he’s turning that experience toward one of the biggest opportunities (and challenges) facing many professionals right now: using AI to its utmost advantage.
Chris will walk attendees through three sessions that dive into the fundamentals of prompt engineering, advanced reasoning techniques, and generating brand-aligned visuals and video. Here, he offers a preview of what participants will learn.
What problem are we trying to solve?
Chris: Associations know AI can help create better content, but they don’t have a realistic manual on how to actually do it. This course moves past abstract tech theory. It helps teams handle daily department tasks, build smart roadmaps and figure out an actual rollout strategy.
How do the AI and human elements work together?
Chris: AI is meant to help staff, not replace them. It knocks out boring, repetitive chores so humans can focus on big-picture judgment and member relationships. We even teach methods like chain-of-thought where the AI explicitly pauses and waits for your thumbs-up before moving to the next step.
Is customer or member data used to train models?
Chris: With free tools, your data is usually used to train the models unless you manually opt out in the settings. Real business tools don’t use your data to train things without permission. That’s exactly why we teach how to write an AI policy so your team knows what’s safe.
What permissions and admin controls exist?
Chris: Data and member trust shouldn’t be handled casually. On good platforms, AI features are totally opt-in, enabled one feature at a time by admins. The AI also honors existing user permissions and stays locked to specific content libraries or scopes.
How are outputs reviewed, cited or corrected?
Chris: Free tools like Gemini and Copilot give you clear web citations, and Claude is awesome at pointing out its own assumptions. If something looks off, models like Gemini 3.1 Flash let you tweak text or layout by just chatting with it. At the end of the day, human review keeps everything aligned with association values.
Are we solving a real association problem, or just responding to momentum?
Chris: You shouldn’t use AI just because of industry hype or pressure. It needs to solve a real problem and save actual time. That’s why the course focuses on practical things like setting up an “llms.txt” file for AI search engines, refining brand voice and creating custom tools for members.
