AI amplifies community managers. It doesn’t replace them.

Chris has been doing this work for 25 years — since before it had a job title. He founded the Virtual Community Network, built social business practices inside IBM and Deloitte, and has run communities for associations at scale, where getting ten thousand members talking to each other is an operational problem, not a metaphor. He has watched every “community killer” arrive — forums, social media, Slack — and watched the work survive all of them. On the show he hosts, anchors, and produces, and he brings the long view: what is genuinely new about AI, and what is the same conversation practitioners have been having for decades.

Marius is doing the job right now. He leads community at Higher Logic, where he runs live experiments with AI agents inside real communities — real members, real escalations, real consequences when the agent gets it wrong. He appears on the show as a practitioner, not a spokesperson: the deployments he talks about are his own, including the ones that didn’t work. His beat is the practical edge of the map — what you can actually hand to an agent this quarter, how you supervise it, and where the human has to stay in the loop. If Chris brings the long view, Marius brings this week’s changelog.