As an industry consultant, I get asked almost on a daily basis about AI. How do I use it to create efficiency in my business? How do I use it to reduce cost? What is the best way to leverage it for my staff? Here’s the thing, AI is not eliminating positions when it’s done right. It’s actually making our staff more readily available to be face-to-face with customers, which is where you want them to be and not in the back running admin tasks.
I want to start here because that’s not where I see most leaders start. When a leader sees an AI tool do in four seconds what a staff member spends four hours a week doing, the first thought is rarely “how do I redesign this job?” It’s usually a simple shaving of hours and implementation of the tool to save on cost and be sure a job gets done because a computer is doing it. Now maybe this isn’t you, and you’ve been avoiding AI, but you know its coming, and in the Community Rec space, we always think about people first, right? We’re always trying to find ways to keep our people happy, create great culture and give people a place where they feel at home. So how do we integrate tools that feel countercultural in the fact that they are effectively dehumanizing the product and experience we are in charge of? Also, what happens to the front desk lead, the program coordinator or the member services manager whose Tuesday looks completely different six months from now?
If you don’t answer that question on purpose, your staff will answer it for you. And they’ll assume the worst: culture is changing, this place isn’t what it used to be and we’re drifting away from our core values. None of these could be further from the truth, but as leaders it is our responsibility to do it the right way so your teams understand how and why this is important. So, lets dig into a few ways we can do this well:
Start With the Duties, Not the Job Title
A job title is a bundle. “Member services coordinator” might mean answering the same twelve questions about pool hours, processing freezes and cancellations, chasing failed payments, calming down an upset parent, training the new hire and remembering that Mrs. Alvarez’s grandson just started swim lessons.
AI doesn’t replace bundles. It replaces pieces of bundles. So, unbundle first.
Sit down with each affected role and list every recurring duty. Not the job description, but the real list. The one the person would write if you asked what they actually did last week. Then sort every item into one of three buckets:
Automate. Repetitive, rules-based, low-judgment work — FAQ responses, appointment reminders, payment retries, report pulls, schedule changes. If the right answer is the same every time, a machine should give it.
Improve. Work that needs a human touch but gets faster or better with AI help. Drafting a program newsletter, summarizing member feedback, building a first pass at a staff schedule or prepping for a partner meeting. The person stays in the driver’s seat. The tool makes sure that it happens on schedule and is an easy lift for the team member.
Keep human. Anything where trust, empathy or judgment is the product. The member who wants to cancel because her husband passed. The coach who’s struggling to get to work on time and needs someone to help find a solution. The school principal deciding whether to partner with you for after-school programming. No member ever renewed because a chatbot was sincere. These tasks need a face and a relationship to show empathy for a loss, develop a plan for a struggling coach or give trust where a partnership is at stake.
Here’s what you’ll find when you do this the right way: the automate bucket is often large, sometimes half the list or more. That’s the number that makes leaders nervous. But look at the human bucket. That’s usually the work the person was hired for, loves the most and never had time to do because the automate bucket ate their week. The beauty of this is that the human tasks can be done so much better when the tedious day to day work is off a leaders plate.
Redesign the Role Around Relationships
Once the automatable work comes off the plate, you have capacity to figure out what to do with. The question is what to fill in, and the answer in our industry is almost always relationships. Three places I’d look first:
Member recovery. Most facilities treat cancellations as a transaction. Process the form, update the system, “hope to see you come back soon,” and move on. What if the person who used to spend ten hours a week answering “what time does the gym open?” now spends those hours calling members whose visits dropped off? AI can flag the at-risk list. It takes a human to make the call that actually saves the membership. You’d be surprised what a few notes in a CRM and a caring voice checking in on you and your kids can do. Ask any pastor of a local church how powerful these moments are.
Community partners. Community rec lives and dies by partnerships: schools, churches, health systems, local employers, senior centers and more. Those relationships need someone who shows up, follows up and remembers the details. That’s a job most of our organizations can’t afford to staff full-time. With automation, you may already have the person on payroll. The other great part about these partnerships is it doesn’t have to be a “sales” role. Who on your staff knows everyones name and details about their life? Likely all your leaders are great at this. Another great note is partnerships can be individually owned, they don’t all have to be on one persons plate. The local sports team can be managed by your rec director. The relationship with your local college president can be managed by your director. The local church relationship can be managed by your gymnastics director who happens to be a member at the church.
Staff coaching. Your experienced people carry institutional knowledge that no knowledge base can fully know, like how to handle the regular who’s always a little combative, or which instructor needs encouragement versus accountability. Freeing a veteran staffer to mentor your newer team members is one of the highest-return moves you can make, and it’s nearly impossible when that veteran is buried in admin.
The point isn’t to create work to justify a salary. It’s to recognize that the relational work is always the most valuable work, and as it stands, we ask our people to do it in their leftover time.
Sometimes the honest answer is that a role doesn’t survive the redesign. That happens, and pretending otherwise is simply niave. But you should arrive at that conclusion after the audit, not before it. Most of the time, the audit tells a different story than what you might think. Allow the deep dive to tell the story without preconceived notions.
Communicate Early, Because the Silence Is Loud
Here’s something I’ve learned leading teams in both business and ministry: people fear more than they’ll say and most hesitate before voicing concerns to leadership.
The moment your staff hears “AI” in a meeting, a quiet calculation starts. Is my job next? Should I update my résumé? Why did my manager just ask me to document my workflow? They won’t raise their hand and ask. They usually just start disengaging, or start a quiet job search.
So don’t wait until the plan is finished to talk about it. By then, the rumor mill has already written its version, and it’s usually worse than yours.
A few practical rules:
- Name it before they do. Tell your team you’re evaluating AI tools and that you’ll be looking at how roles change. Saying it out loud takes the air out of the fear.
- Bring them into the audit. The person doing the job knows which duties are truly repetitive and which only look that way. Asking them to help sort their own work into the three buckets turns a threat into a project, and gives them real say in what their job becomes.
- Be honest about what you don’t know yet. “I don’t have every answer, but I promise you’ll hear it from me first” is more reassuring than a polished statement that sounds like HR wrote it.
- Show the redesign, not just the reduction. When you announce that something is being automated, announce in the same breath what that person will now own. Subtraction without addition sounds like a countdown or lack of trust. Which can’t be further from the truth.
- Invest in the transition. If you’re asking someone to move from processing forms to building community partnerships, train them for it. New expectations without new skills is a setup to fail and isn’t fair for anyone.
The Real Efficiency
There’s a version of AI adoption that saves money for a quarter and costs you culture for years. Your best people watch how you treat the first person whose job changes. If that person gets a spreadsheet and slowly gets pushed out, everyone else learns what they’re worth to you. If that person gets a seat at the table and a better job on the other side, everyone else learns that too.
Automate the task. Invest in the person. The technology will keep getting smarter. Whether your organization does too, depends entirely on how you lead the people through it.
