If you’re a B2B community manager and a fan of epic adventures, the blockbuster film The Odyssey might feel…familiar.
Dedicated online community managers care deeply about their crew (their customers). They are focused on home (a powerful community experience). They very much want smooth sailing. Yet obstacles shape the voyage:
- The Hydra: too many competing responsibilities without clear priorities
- Circe: the temptation to lean on activity metrics without alignment to company mission
- The Cyclops: leadership’s singular focus on acquisition at the expense of retention
- And of course, the Siren song of “Can’t we just ‘do AI?’”
We’d love to go on.
For Community Managers, AI Seems Like A Suiter, But It’s Really The Wind
In the epic poem that inspired the film, ‘suitors’ prowl Ithaca hoping to replace Odysseus as king. It’s natural to think of AI as a similar threat to an authentic community experience. One community manager told us, “I want to protect the community as a human-to-human engagement. That’s the defining trait of a community.”
In our new reports “B2B Customer Communities Need An AI-Powered Reboot” and “AI Unlocks The Potential Of Online Communities” and the updated role profile for B2B Online Community Manager (Forrester license required for all three), we examined the opportunity for community managers to use AI to fill the community’s sails and propel it towards quantifiable ROI.
How Do AI Capabilities Fit With Community Managers’ Priorities?
Community teams are exploring the AI features built into online community platforms and connecting community data and commonly used AI tools such as Chat GPT and Claude. Use cases can be granular (moderation, guided journeys) or expansive (offering a digital “hub” for customer experience). At any altitude, AI is a powerful toolset that can help communities evolve into must-have business investments.
But the ship does not steer itself. Communities that benefit from using AI take control of their voyage. They use AI purposefully to help managers, customer members, and the business itself get the most value out of the experience.
How Can AI Assist Community Managers?
Community managers can use AI capabilities to handle repetitive work and reclaim valuable time. Teams can scale and mitigate risk when they use AI to:
- Develop valuable content and internal guidance. GenAI helps community managers turn content into value. It can assemble and summarize discussions into usable content. Product, sales, and marketing teams can then use these summaries to guide messaging and product improvements.
- Combat the negative effects of bad actors. AI has plenty of potential pitfalls, including allowing self-serving or misleading AI-created content to creep into discussions. Predictive AI can scan for slop and detect patterns that may indicate bot activity.
- Maintain community civility. AI moderation agents automatically review posts, flag or filter out inappropriate content, and tag discussions.
How Can AI Help Communities Resonate With Customers?
Forrester’s B2B Marketing Online Community Survey, June 2026, reveals that peer-to-peer connections are the most important purpose of online communities. Teams can use AI to enhance community experience with:
- Quick access to expertise. AI can help users get quick answers to specific product questions, validate ideas based on peer input, and search knowledge bases.
- Guidance for advancement and improvement. Robust online communities go beyond responding to questions. AI-guided content recommendations and next best actions help customers follow the right paths for efficient onboarding, increased adoption, and productive goal achievement.
- Higher-quality content. Users must feel confident they are finding the right answers and hearing from real experts. AI can help to surface expert opinions and reduce spam or other low-quality content.
How Can AI Connect Communities To Business Impact?
Many community teams struggle to connect community to business objectives such as growth, retention, brand reputation, and efficiency. Teams can use AI to strengthen those connections when they:
- Optimize community for AI-powered search. AI-driven search visibility has expanded community’s potential beyond its home platform and into the realm of answer engines. Community managers should structure posts, accepted answers, and summaries for AEO, clarity, and reuse.
- Find growth and advocacy opportunities. AI can surface growth opportunities and spot churn risk by analyzing participation patterns, sentiment, and intent signals. AI helps community teams find potential customer advocates, those members who are highly active, responsive, and willing to share their expertise to support .
- Route activity to other systems for action. AI can facilitate connecting community engagement tasks or assets between support platforms, CRM, customer success solutions, or purpose-built product management tools.
While 93% of customer marketers in Forrester’s Customer Retention, Growth, and Advocacy Survey 2025, use genAI in their daily work, 30% of that same group says genAI poses significant risk to their business. Like Odysseus did with the wind, it’s time to leverage AI to reshape your community journey, bending it to your advantage rather than letting it blow you off course. Reach out to discuss the impact of AI on your customer community.
