I feel like more and more of the people that previously would go community-first for help are shifting towards “doing their own research” (particularly with AI). In an AI-first, zero-click, developer experience, where does community still have a role?

During a call today I got into the topic of the future of online community. There has always been a small percentage of developer communities that will engage with online communities (whether StackOverflow, Slacks, Discords, etc.). Most folks are just silently relying on Google, api docs, and figuring stuff out to get stuff done. But for the rest, there was always the ability to go to online communities to connect with other folks solving the same problems and getting some direct help. From a product vendor perspective, this type of community investment also helped deflect tickets away from support and allow folks that weren’t paying customers or didn’t have urgent issues to have a way to get help.

With AI chatbots now being the first chat that folks are having to get through their challenges, where does this put a product community focus?

I have viewed community as focusing on these 4 things:
1. Ensuring product success by helping users through friction points.
2. Education and enablement on the future to drive adoption of new products or product features.
3. Creating a sense of belonging/stickyness to the product with human connection.
4. Inspiring product ambassadors that would provide trusted, third-party, evangelism for your product.

In a world where AI is now your brainstorming and chat buddy about a product, it is the AI that brings folks through friction points. It is the AI that surfaces the options that you have available to you. This puts those first two focus areas squarely onto investments in product documentation and content.

Are people still wanting that human connection around software communities? I think people still need human connection around shared experiences and many folks crave that social connection in online communities, but I’m not sure this should be vendor focused anymore? For example, I would expect folks will still want to share their latest concerns around hashtag#AIOps or hashtag#GenAI, but not necessarily needing to chat specifically in a ChatGPT community.

But when people are making product decisions by running deep research through AI tools to qualify their vendors and execute detailed comparisons on their specific needs, that third-party searchable content becomes key.

So if the future of developer communities no longer has as much importance on creating human connections between folks with a shared experience, what will be the new way to inspire loyal and trusted ambassadors?

I don’t have the answers on this, but I think that things are about to get really wild with experimentation, because the old ways are not going to work the same anymore.