“I'm a technologist at heart. I love the technology. It's fun, but I don't care about it at the end of the day. What matters is whether or not we as associations, like broadly, are advancing our missions or not.”
Sidecar Sync · August 2026
Nagarajan was describing what he saw at the ASAE annual conference, where association leaders had moved past experimenting and were actually shipping AI work. He has, in his own words, been beating the drum about AI for years, which makes the disavowal at the end of the answer the surprising part. The measure he offers instead is whether members' lives are better, not whether the technology is impressive.
Transcript
And we are your hosts. And as usual, there's nothing happening in the world of AI. So I think we're done for the episode, right, Mallory?
Yep, 30-second episode, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Just kidding. We've got a lot to cover today. Amit, I know you are fresh off some travel to ASAE annual. How was that?
…And it's pretty cool to have a raging party going where everyone's, you know, coming to get excited about AI. But the most important thing is I'm hearing people talk about how it's helping them serve their members. It's not just about internal efficiency, but people are saying, hey, like I'm able to actually do AB and C to make my members' lives better because of AI. So technology is awesome. I'm a technologist at heart. I love the technology. It's fun, but I don't care about it at the end of the day. What matters is whether or not we as associations, like broadly, are advancing our missions or not. And that's what I'm starting to see.
Did you hear about any use cases from association leaders that surprised you? Because I feel like as much as we talk about and you think about this, it would be pretty difficult for you to hear about a use case that you hadn't already thought about. But I'm curious, have you heard anything recently…
Mario, have you ever seen the video where there's, you know, there's basically a bunch of distractions going on in this video? I'm trying to remember exactly what it is, but it's essentially you're watching like a landscape and you're watching all sorts of people moving around. And they're saying…
Wow. I love a good analogy, Amith. I have not seen the video you're talking about. I'll have to go find it after we record this, but I'm going to try to carry this through line throughout the episode of finding the gorilla and making sure you're open enough to see it when it walks in the room.
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