Most of What Associations Sell Is Becoming Worthless. The Rest Is Becoming Priceless.

There is an essay making the rounds in technology circles that every association leader should read. It was written by Sahaj Garg, a Stanford-educated co-founder and CTO based in Silicon Valley. He's not a commentator. He's someone building AI products daily, watching the shift happen in real time. His argument is worth sitting with, because it doesn't arrive with the breathless optimism of most AI commentary. It arrives with something closer to clear-eyed unease.

His central claim is that we are past the point of asking whether AI will exceed human capability across most cognitive domains. It already has. The remaining question is not if but when the full implications arrive - and he believes the "when" is measured in months and years, not decades.

I'm going to summarise his argument as briefly as I can, and then tell you what I think it means for associations.

What the Article Actually Says

In his essay, The Displacement of Cognitive Labor and What Comes After, Garg describes a world in which human labour falls into two broad categories.

• Cognitive labour - analysis, writing, legal reasoning, financial modelling, medical diagnosis, coding, project management, coaching. This is the category being automated now.
• Physical labour - construction, agriculture, trades, logistics - which follows a different timeline, compressed by the fact that AI is now accelerating the research and development of robotics.

His estimate is that, within three to five years, the majority of cognitive jobs will be substantially automated. Not eliminated overnight, but requiring far fewer humans to produce the same output. Within a decade, physical labour begins to follow.

This means services that currently cost hundreds or thousands of dollars become effectively free. Legal advice, financial planning, medical triage, educational tutoring, software development, information analysis, design - all of it approaches zero marginal cost.

What does not become abundant, and may become more valuable, is a different kind of list entirely.

Physical presence and embodied experience. Being in the room. The concert, the handshake, the conversation that happens face to face. AI can simulate presence but cannot provide it.

Land and physical scarcity. There is still only one block in that location, one view from that window, one patch of coastline. No amount of intelligence changes geography.

Craft and human-made goods. The hand-thrown bowl, the bespoke suit, the meal cooked by someone who cares. The value is inseparable from the human who made it - and increasingly, people will pay a premium to know that.

Taste, curation, and genuine judgment. Knowing what to ask for, recognising what is good, having a point of view that is authentically yours. AI can generate options endlessly. It cannot tell you which one matters.

Social proof and credentials. Being known, being vouched for, having a reputation that other humans have verified and stand behind. In a world of infinite AI-generated content and capability, knowing who to trust becomes more valuable, not less.

Community and belonging. The experience of being part of something with other people - shared purpose, shared identity, shared progress. This is not a feature. It is a fundamental human need that no platform or product can fully substitute.

Political representation and advocacy. Someone who fights for your interests, is accountable to you, and shows up when the stakes are high. Collective voice remains stubbornly human.

The person willing to bear responsibility when something goes wrong. AI can advise, analyse, and recommend. It cannot be held accountable. The human who signs their name, stands behind their judgment, and accepts the consequences of being wrong - that person becomes more valuable in a world where accountability is increasingly rare.

His most poignant observation is about identity. While the economic disruption will be severe, he argues that the identity crisis may be worse. When a steelworker lost their job in the Rust Belt, they didn't just lose income. They lost who they were. The same dynamic is coming for knowledge workers - at a far larger scale. "I'm smart, I solve hard problems, I build things" is not just a job description. It's a self-concept. When AI can solve harder problems and build things faster, that self-concept shatters.

He ends not with a solution but with a set of open questions about how we build meaning, status, and social structure in a world where material production is no longer the organising principle of human life.

What This Means for Associations

Almost everything that is becoming abundant is what associations have traditionally sold.

Research and information. Training and education. Access to knowledge. Regulatory guidance. Technical content. CPD. These are the products that have funded association operations for decades - and they are precisely the categories Garg identifies as approaching zero marginal cost. A member who can get a better answer to a technical question from an AI in forty-five seconds is going to stop valuing a journal article or a webinar that tells them the same thing more slowly.

This is not speculation. It is already happening. And the associations that respond by producing more content, more resources, more information are doubling down on exactly the wrong bet.

The good news is that almost everything that is not becoming abundant is what associations uniquely own. Garg's list of what remains scarce and valuable includes:

• community and belonging
• social proof and credentials
• taste, curation, and judgment
• advocacy and political representation and
• the human who bears responsibility when things go wrong.

That is an excellent description of what a well-functioning association does.

Associations define what competent practice looks like. They verify who meets those standards. They maintain those standards over time. They fight for the profession in legislative and regulatory spaces. They create the community within which professional identity lives. They are the body that stands behind a credential and says: this person is accountable to something larger than themselves.

None of that is automatable. All of it is becoming more valuable.

The Identity Opportunity 

Garg's point about identity deserves specific attention, because I think it represents the single largest opportunity (and the single largest risk) for the association sector. 

His argument is that displaced knowledge workers won't just face an economic shock. They will face a dissolution of self. And the historical evidence suggests that people in that position don't calmly retrain and adapt. They grieve. They lose purpose. They look for something to belong to.

Garg is careful to distinguish between needing work and needing what work provides. What people actually need, he argues, are four things that work has traditionally delivered:

• Agency - the sense that your choices matter;
• Contribution - the sense that others value what you do;
• Mastery - the feeling of getting better at something; and
• Connection - belonging to something larger than yourself.

Work has been the primary vehicle for all four. When work is disrupted, it isn't just income that disappears. It's the entire structure through which people have experienced meaning.

Associations are uniquely positioned to provide all four - independently of whatever the job market is doing.

A professional association is not just a service provider. At its best, it is the custodian of a professional identity that exists independently of any particular employer, role, or economic moment. It says: you are a member of this profession, with these standards and values and history, regardless of what the job market is doing to your daily work.

That is an extraordinarily valuable thing to be able to offer at a moment when professional identity is under structural threat.

But only associations that have genuinely invested in professional identity and community will be positioned to offer it. Associations that have operated primarily as content businesses, event businesses, or credentialing machines will find that the AI disruption removes their core product without replacing it with anything.

The associations that will matter in ten years are the ones that can answer one question cleanly: when a member's professional world is disrupted, do they turn to us?

If the honest answer is "probably not", the work is in building the kind of belonging, standards, advocacy, and identity infrastructure that earns that response. And it takes longer to build than you might think.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The pivot isn't about abandoning what you do. It's about understanding which parts of what you do are becoming worthless and which are becoming priceless - and investing accordingly. 

Stop competing on information. AI will always win that game. The question is not whether your journal article is good. It's whether it can compete with instant, personalised, free. It cannot. Redirect the resources you spend producing content toward the things AI cannot replicate: community infrastructure, peer connection, professional standards, and the human conversations that matter.

Invest in your credential like it's a trust infrastructure. Because in the AI-aware world Garg describes, it is. Your accreditation, your register, your fellowship grades - these are the mechanisms by which professionals will be verified, trusted, and given access to more powerful tools. Treat them with the rigour and care that warrants.

Make belonging structural, not incidental. Networking events are not community. Community is a sustained sense of shared identity, shared standards, and shared progress. Build the conditions for it - peer groups, mentoring relationships, shared practice, the rituals and language of professional life - and protect them.

Own the advocacy space. Political representation and collective voice are explicitly on Garg's list of things that remain scarce and valuable. If your association doesn't do advocacy seriously, start. If it does, resource it better. As the economic disruption arrives, the professions that have a strong, organised voice will be far better positioned than those that have operated in polite isolation.

Be the place members turn when things get hard. Not just for a conference or a resource. For genuine professional support, peer solidarity, and the kind of community that makes a disrupted moment navigable rather than isolating.

A Question to Consider

Garg asks, at the end of his essay, what structures we need to build so that humans can experience agency, contribution, mastery, and connection in a world where work no longer provides them automatically.

Agency. Contribution. Mastery. Connection.

A well-designed association provides all four.

The question isn't whether associations are relevant in the world Garg describes. They may be more relevant than they have ever been. The question is whether yours is ready to be.