‍Who wrote this?
Armen Nercesian is the Co-Founder of Verbate, where he works with leading companies to modernize how ERGs operate. Before Verbate, Armen built his career in marketing and product - designing and working inside the kinds of matrixed organizations this article draws from.

The One-Hour ERG Leader

We've spent the last year in conversations with program managers navigating AI adoption, and a pattern keeps surfacing: the tools are getting better, leaders are starting to use them, and the operating models those leaders work within weren't designed for this level of efficiency. It's part of why we're currently beta-testing Verbate Navigator - an expert AI knowledge base, built on our frameworks from working with 100+ ERG programs, that deploys directly into your company's existing AI tools. We're working with a small group of build partners to refine it, and the conversations happening around that process are revealing just how much operating model assumptions need to catch up.

One program manager told us: "If I give my leaders AI tools that let two people do what six used to, my operating model doesn't make sense anymore." Another described watching a co-lead generate an event brief, a full communications plan, and a run of show in a single sitting - work that previously would have been distributed across three or four board members over two weeks.

A motivated ERG leader with a properly configured AI workflow can move from "we don't have an idea" to "we have finished assets ready for review" in about an hour. The leader isn't doing less thinking - they're spending less time on the mechanical parts of execution. And that shift has structural consequences most ERG operating models aren't built to absorb.

The Matrix Analogy

Most ERG leadership teams are structured around functional lanes: comms lead, events coordinator, treasurer, membership chair. Whether they realize it or not, these boards are built along the same axis that marketing organizations call the "channel" or "functional" side of a matrix.

In a well-run marketing org, you have two axes. The strategic axis (product or business line owners) decides what to do and why. The functional axis (email, search, events) handles how and delivers assets. When execution becomes cheaper through better tools, smart organizations reallocate leadership energy toward the strategic axis.

Most ERG boards today are structured almost entirely along that functional axis. Five of six typical board roles are defined by what the person does - a production channel they own. The program manager, meanwhile, operates as a triage layer: quality-controlling outputs, coaching leaders through individual moments, and following up to make sure each functional lead is executing.

When AI compresses the execution timeline from weeks to hours, these roles start to hollow out - they still exist on paper, but the work that justified them has fundamentally changed. And the PM's triage role becomes increasingly reactive, chasing the gaps in a structure that no longer reflects how the work actually gets done.

The Strategic Board

The alternative isn't fewer leaders - it's differently oriented leaders. Instead of organizing around functional execution lanes, organize around strategic ownership areas. And notice the PM role at the bottom: instead of triage, the program manager builds and maintains the shared infrastructure - templates, trackers, structured briefs - that every group uses. That infrastructure is what makes AI-assisted execution consistent across the entire portfolio and enables interoperability between groups.

Every leader owns a domain of strategic influence, not a production channel. The functional execution - writing comms, building briefs, drafting budget requests - is handled through AI-assisted workflows that any of these leaders can access. The value they bring is judgment, relationships, and direction.

The Program Manager as Infrastructure Builder

If leaders are shifting to strategic ownership, the PM role shifts too. The instinct is to say the PM becomes a "strategic coach." There's truth to that - you're absolutely still the person helping leaders navigate cross-functional relationships and holding them accountable to their strategic portfolios. But the more foundational shift is this: the program manager becomes the builder and maintainer of the information infrastructure that makes AI-assisted execution actually work.

This isn't a theoretical claim. Verbate's 2026 Annual ERG Program Manager Report found that infrastructure - not budget, not portfolio size - is the single strongest predictor of whether an ERG program is growing, stable, or declining. Organizations with strong infrastructure (three to four support structures in place) reported dramatically higher confidence and investment growth than those without it.

Here's what that means in practice. For a leader to sit down with an AI tool and produce a strong event brief in thirty minutes, certain things need to already exist: a brief template with the right fields, a current budget tracker the AI can reference, recent meeting notes that provide context on member interests, a governance document outlining approval workflows. Without that scaffolding, the AI works from nothing.

The PM's job becomes ensuring that infrastructure exists and is consistently used. That means building the templates. Holding leaders accountable to capturing meeting notes after every group meeting. Maintaining a shared budget tracker. Creating the structured inputs - planning briefs, event request forms, feedback surveys - that both leaders and AI tools rely on. When a leader can hand the AI a blank brief template and say "I want to plan this event, help me fill it out," and the AI already knows the group's goals, budget, and recent member feedback - that's infrastructure doing its job.

You're not reviewing every draft. You're building the system that makes the first draft great.

Plan the Transition Over Two Years

This doesn't require an all-at-once overhaul. The smarter approach is a phased transition timed to your existing leadership cycles.

Phase 1: Test the tools within your current model. Introduce AI workflows to your existing leaders. Let them experience the efficiency gains. Pay attention to which functional roles start to feel underutilized - that's your signal about where the model is already straining.

Phase 2: Build the infrastructure. Use what you learn to develop the templates, tracking systems, and structured inputs that make AI workflows effective. This is the PM's primary focus during this phase: creating the scaffolding the next generation of leaders will inherit.

Phase 3: Redesign roles at the next election cycle. When current leaders rotate out and new ones come in, rewrite the role definitions around strategic ownership areas. Incoming leaders inherit a tested, refined system - the uncomfortable learning curve has already been absorbed by the outgoing cohort.

Your current leaders may end up as a transitional cohort whose experience is a mix of old model and new. That's okay. What they're building through experimentation and feedback is a far better starting point for the leaders who follow them. And the leadership roles that emerge on the other side - oriented around influence, relationships, and strategic impact - may prove to be a more compelling pitch for prospective leaders than the functional roles they're replacing.

The Question You Can't Avoid

Every ERG program manager will face this choice in the next twelve to eighteen months. The tools exist. The efficiency gains are real. And the gap between what's possible with AI and what your current operating model accommodates is only going to widen.

The strategic board isn't just a response to AI. It's arguably what ERG leadership should have looked like all along - oriented around influence, relationships, and member impact rather than task execution. AI just made the case impossible to ignore.

Verbate's AI Navigator helps ERG programs deploy expert-guided AI workflows for the functional moments leaders encounter most. We're currently working with a small group of build partners to refine the experience. If you're interested in being part of that, let's talk.