AI and the Future of Facilitation: A Call to Action for Professional Facilitators

AI is changing the nature of facilitation. Over the next two years, many facilitators will discover new, more empowering, efficient and exciting options for engaging their clients. Other facilitators will see their work and opportunities decline and dry up. The key differentiator between those groups will be how quickly they explore and adapt the rapidly exploding capabilities of AI to suit new opportunities in their evolving client base. 

Already, different versions of AI (some of them free) can:

• Design and create resources for a successful workshop - for you, or, indeed, for your clients directly. [try it out]
• Conduct interviews and interactive surveys, and prepare people for workshops
• Provide participants and breakout groups with instant objective feedback (and/or guidance) on their proposed contributions
• Equip us with an easy to comprehend, broad, insightful perspective on the topic we are facilitating, and its potential issues
• Select appropriate new tools, techniques and templates suited to making the progress our clients need, and train us in them
• Analyse, summarise and organise masses of output and/or input to highlight patterns which make it easier to digest
• Reflect and provide feedback on the emotional component of events in terms of sentiment, mood, behaviour, openness
• And, if your group is multinational or diverse, it can adapt content to accommodate different cultures, learning styles and language skills

The great thing about this is that it can also equip our clients, the leaders of teams and organisations, to do the same. In this way, they can more easily adopt facilitative (less directive) approaches in all aspects of their work and meetings. Thereby creating a work environment much more conducive to enabling and supporting the best in their people. And many will do this - they will 'step up their game' to the benefit of all concerned.

But where does that leave us as independent professional facilitators? Well, it creates a much larger market of people who truly understand and appreciate the importance and benefits of our craft. People who can better appreciate others who are more skilled in this area, who they can learn from, and who they can rely on when they need a truly independent perspective.

They will be seeking professionals who they can emulate and learn from. People who know even more about facilitation and AI, and who can do it better. And that means we have to step up our own game. We have to keep at least one step ahead in our own skills.

Of course, like all skills, we only get to fully appreciate and demonstrate their full potential by enthusiastically engaging with them, playing with them, experimenting, refining approaches and learning with like-minded colleagues. Fortunately for us, the IAF is a community designed to do exactly that.

Join us

Join us as we learn together about the capabilities and opportunities of AI for facilitation. Explore the potential and pitfalls. Be part of a community pushing at the edges of this vital development. If you would like to know more, drop an email to Irene Maweu, Mike Clargo, Paul Nunesdea or Peter Seah, and ask us about the new SIG on AI and Group Facilitation.