AI amplifies community managers. It doesn’t replace them.

Chris Heuer is the host of CommunityAssistant.ai, where he is developing the Community Assistant Work Map, an open inventory of nearly 300 community management jobs to be done, classified as human, agent, or hybrid.

In 1994 he saw the power of community and launched Virtual Community Network, a local content network rooted in real world communities. He went on to found the Social Media Club, growing it to more than 350 chapters worldwide. This led to him becoming an early advisor and participant in the Gov 2.0 community and advising dozens of other communities globally.

While at Deloitte, he led the global enterprise social network rollout to more than 200,000 employees. There he published the “Engagement Curve”, a model for translating community engagement and social media signals into measurable business return. This led to his work transforming the engagement strategy at the American Heart Association, and he later served on their national advisory board. He was also a futurist at IBM, a lead mentor in Google’s Launchpad Accelerator, and the Managing Director of the Team Flow Institute.

At present, he is a Partner with Inflection Point, a founder-led growth systems firm that assembles senior specialists around startups and growth-stage businesses, connecting strategy with execution by leveraging systems thinking, artificial intelligence, and hard earned wisdom.

Marius Ciortea serves as the Chief Community Officer at Higher Logic, where he helps shape how community connects with marketing, learning, events, and data to create meaningful, scalable engagement for associations, enterprises, and member-driven organizations.

His work focuses on helping organizations grow participation and insight without losing the trust, governance, and human connection that make communities valuable. He’s especially interested in thoughtful uses of AI that surface knowledge, scale engagement, and strengthen relationships while keeping people in control.

He partners closely with product, customer success, and innovation teams to help customers modernize their engagement strategies and make community a durable foundation for learning, growth, and long-term loyalty.

Before Higher Logic, he led IBM’s global community ecosystem, where he gained firsthand experience building community at scale with a focus on governance, reliability, and sustainable value.