168. Matrix Group International, Inc. Staff on Turbocharging with AI, Storytelling, and Personali...

In this special episode of Associations Thrive, host Joanna Pineda is joined by colleagues from Matrix Group International, Inc.: Dave Hoernig, Vice President of Software Engineering, Jessica Parsley, Director of Project Management, and Alex Pineda, Creative Director. They look back on the trends they’re seeing in the association space. They discuss:

1. How AI dominated 2025, with associations investing heavily in staff training, internal policies, and custom GPTs to boost content production and streamline workflows.
2. The AI tools that helped Matrix Group clients modernize outdated content by converting PDFs to HTML, summarizing large documents, and creating metadata and schema for better discoverability.
3. Why associations wrestled with how much previously gated content to expose for AI indexing, balancing member-only value with public visibility and relevance in AI search results.
4. “About the Industry” storytelling sections of a website becoming a trend, with associations crafting narratives to spotlight the importance of their fields not just to members, but to the public and policymakers.
5. How clients faced tighter budgets in 2025, making incremental updates and data-driven decisions more important than ever.
6. The notable rise of multimedia content, with podcasts and audio read-alouds replacing and supplementing long-form text to meet member preferences and improve accessibility.
7. How personalization is becoming easier with AI and how associations can now deliver customized recommendations for members, modeled after platforms like Netflix or Duolingo.
8. How AI is revolutionizing design and development, with tools that boost creativity, accelerate prototyping, and reduce tedious manual work.
9. How mobile-first and voice-enabled experiences are expected to surge, especially as younger members rely more on phones and smart speakers for web interaction.


References:

1. Matrix Group Website (https://www.matrixgroup.net/)
2. See how TFI (https://www.tfi.org/) tells the story of the industry.
3. We made a few tweaks to the ALDA (https://www.thealda.org/) website in advance of a larger redesign in the future.