Sift AI

Over the past six months, we’ve explored how large language models (#LLM’s like #GPT) and generative AI can help organizations truly understand their customers and communities. We started by engaging with hundreds of teams to understand how modern companies engage with their customers. They use a lot of traditional platforms, but we quickly saw how many companies use Discord servers, Slack workspaces, and other community platforms as a primary way to interact with their customers. We learned that these companies run these communities for several crucial reasons: - To build excitement and engagement around their offerings - To provide support and help users maximize the benefits of their products - To guide potential users through the sales funnel and facilitate conversions - To identify brand champions and develop ambassador programs - To collect feedback for continual product improvement - To foster a sense of belonging and loyalty - and a lot more… Whether it’s SaaS, developer relations, gaming, web3 or consumer goods, community is a central element across industries. But these spaces can be messy and teams often struggle to understand what’s happening within their communities—especially those managing user bases ranging from 10k-1M+ people. That’s exactly why we’ve been building Sift AI, an AI-first experience management platform that helps you understand and take action on what your customers are discussing across channels. Think of us as your community copilot, analyzing all of your customer interactions, assessing their satisfaction, and guiding you on how to act on their needs. Why #AI? Generative AI understands context and human language in a deeper way than ever before. Instead of relying on keywords, generative AI understands what your customers and community members are talking about in the context of your business and what you’re trying to accomplish. We can understand your product, your goals, and make sure you’re taking the actions needed to drive the right customer outcomes. For now, we’re starting with community data but are actively exploring applications in other areas of customer data and voice, from Support data to Social data and more. Visit us at Sift AI to see how we can take your customer experiences to the next level! 🚀

Today, I shared the story of Code & Coffee at DevRelCon and more NY. On my favorite topic, building meetups! I never thought I’d be here 🥹 I shared my framework for meetup community decision making (Belonging, Trust, Safety), prescriptions, and the stuff it takes to produce sustainable and resilient meetups. From 1 active chapter to 35. Thank you Major League Hacking for organizing and having me speak. Video coming soon! Most importantly, I made a ton of new friends and “met up” some of my biggest inspirations! Thanks for SF organizer Justin C. and Ptah Dunbar for the photos!

I'm giving a talk this Friday at DevRelCon and more. If you're going to be around - I'd love to meet ya! I genuinely never thought I'd be at the premiere, and only, Developer Relations conference. Let alone speaking about a topic I love talking about, building meetups. When I started bringing in-person meetups in 2021, beginning with NYC, it was to fulfill a self-need, a strong desire for connection. Something deeply within me could not accept the status quo of virtual and inconsistent in-person meetups. After an entire year of hiking (83 hikes), meeting 0 people, and deep reflection. And NOTHING changing in the in-person developer community space. I had to take the opportunity to drive from DC to NYC every two weeks until it made sense.   I'll admit, It made no traditional tangible sense in 2021. In 2022, I quit my first DevRel job at a YC-backed early-stage startup to pursue expanding it. Yet neverless I persisted, through variants upon variants. Layoffs after layoffs. We grew from 1 to 7 meetups in 2022 and, in 2023, 25 meetups. Today, we're at 35 meetups across North America, meeting every two weeks and monthly. We even had Minneapolis and Portland start this past weekend. I am thankful to be accepted and to share space with experts who are seen as leaders in content, code, and community. Big thanks to Sift AI for supporting me, the 50+ current and past sponsors, and the 200+ hard-working local leaders and volunteers of Code & Coffee for trusting me as their leader. For folks at DevRelCon, my talk will be on Friday at 2:10pm! See ya there :) Below is a pic of me emceeing at my local community-run conference, DC Frontrunners.

Building a new community involves dealing with malicious scammers, phishers, and trolls. Actually, not at all. When building a community, you choose who belongs and who doesn't belong. You and your community set the boundaries and principles. 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 Ideally, everyone follows the rules. 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 Ideally, everyone feels welcome. 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 Ideally, you grow the community really big without growing pains. 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 Ideally, everything goes according to plan. But it never does. Communities can suddenly cease operations, abandon renowned user-led programs, and eventually get acquired. Creating a less fulfilling company-led community, in most cases, leading to the same result as many well-intentioned company-led community motions. > A lack of community engagement or, worse, the sunsetting of a once-renowned community. At Code & Coffee our 368 annual events are community-led and volunteer-run from the start by design. 1️⃣ We give ownership to the local community. 2️⃣ By virtue, not beholden to a single organizational entity. 3️⃣ Operate on principles of belonging, safety, and trust. At Sift AI we're trying to understand how to effectively use LLMs, drawing on conversational data, to nudge community leaders to stay on track after constant non-𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭 situations that are sometimes out of their control. So that we can focus on authentic community interactions that lead to the ideal community. One built on the ideal of sustainability and resilience. NY Code & Coffee’s very first event:

As we've been exploring how CX teams operate, we've seen a trend. For a long time, CX teams have been relying on surveys to understand their customer health and voice. Surveys are inherently limited, biased, and give you a small picture based on when they come out. Why limit ourselves to surveys? We’ve got so many places that people are talking about your products. - Community Platforms (that you’ve spent time building): Slack, Discord, Reddit - Support Tickets - Socials (Twitter, Linkedin, etc) - Forums - Product Usage …and more In the past, it took loads of work to wrangle this data and make sense of it. But, with AI & LLMs it’s become easier than ever. They can go through and sift through mountains of unstructured data and content from various sources and help you make sense of them. Your data can go from entirely qualitative soup, to a valuable mix of quantitative and qualitative insights. There are quick wins to be had like using LLMs to summarize what's happening, but there's so much more AI can do to help triage, breakdown content in different ways (like routing it to the right teams & products). If this interests you, visit Sift AI to see how we can take your CX teams to the next level with AI! 🚀 #ai, #llm