Skip to main content

Starting a Chapter

How to launch an Applied AI Society chapter in your city or on your campus.

Why Chapters Exist​

Applied AI Society exists to shorten the time for young people to get their first applied AI money-making opportunity. Chapters are where that actually happens.

There's a massive gap between what AI can do and what organizations are actually doing with it. That gap is full of opportunity: consulting gigs, startup ideas, automation contracts, freelance engineering work, full-time roles. But most young people can't see those opportunities from where they sit. They need to be in a room with people who are already making money in this space.

Chapters create that room. Practitioners share how they earn a living in applied AI. Business owners describe the problems they'll pay to have solved. Members build networks that generate real deal flow, career flow, and knowledge flow. Every chapter is a local center of gravity for the applied AI economy in its city or campus.

The model is subsidiarity: national provides the playbooks, brand, and network. You provide the energy, the people, and the local context.

You're a Good Fit to Start a Chapter If...​

  • You're entrepreneurial. You see building an applied AI network as completely in your self interest. You want to be at the center of your city's applied AI economy, not waiting for someone to hand you the opportunity.
  • You're a connector. You don't need to be the most technical person in the room. You need to be the person who gets the right people into the room.
  • You can mobilize. Given two weeks' notice, you can get 50-75 people to show up. You already have a network, or you know how to build one fast.
  • You recognize the implementation gap. You see organizations around you that know they should be using AI but have no idea how. That frustrates you.
  • You're high agency, low ego. You'll figure things out without waiting to be told what to do. You'll give credit to others and focus on the community, not your personal brand.
  • You're in the right life stage. Late college, just graduated, or early career. Or you're someone who mentors people in that window and wants to build alongside them.

This Probably Isn't for You If...​

  • You're looking for a paid position from day one. Chapter leaders earn through the network they build, not a salary from national.
  • You want a detailed instruction manual for every decision. We provide playbooks and support, but you're running your chapter. Ownership is the point.
  • You want to consume, not contribute. Applied AI Society is for people who build, share, and connect. If you're looking to passively attend events without putting anything back into the community, this isn't the right fit.
  • You don't actually want to be in the applied AI space yourself. Chapter leaders are practitioners first, organizers second.

Know Your City's Scene​

Before you start a chapter, take a hard look at what already exists in your city. Every city has a different AI landscape, and your chapter needs to fit that landscape, not copy-paste what works somewhere else.

We think about this as an ideal scene profile: treating cities themselves as distinct profiles with their own strengths, gaps, and cultures.

Questions to ask:

  • How many AI communities already exist here? If your city is already saturated with AI meetups, clubs, and events, your chapter needs a sharper angle. If there's almost nothing, you have wide open space but less existing momentum to tap into.
  • What's the talent mix? Is your city heavy on research and academia (universities, labs) or on applied, commercial work (agencies, startups, enterprises)? The gap between "people who know AI" and "people who get paid to apply AI" varies by city. Your programming should address your city's specific gap.
  • How does community work here? In some cities, one group text gets 50 people to show up. In others, it takes weeks of outreach to fill a room. Understanding your city's community culture tells you how much effort to budget for mobilization.
  • Are there customers nearby? Chapters thrive when there are local businesses who will pay for applied AI work. If most of your city's talent has to look elsewhere for clients, the practitioner pipeline is harder to build.
  • Who's already doing this work? Find the other community leaders, meetup organizers, and ecosystem builders in your city. If you can't name them, you need to spend more time learning the landscape before launching. A chapter leader who doesn't know the other players in their city is a red flag.

The principle: We're most impactful in cities where the floor needs raising. Cities already on the bleeding edge of AI (dense talent, tons of events, strong networks) may not need another community. Cities with real talent but no connective tissue for applied AI work: that's where chapters change lives.

Your chapter doesn't have to look like Austin's. It should look like your city, run by someone who understands what your city needs.

What National Provides​

Cofounders who open doors. Applied AI Society was cofounded by Gary Sheng and Travis Oliphant (creator of NumPy, SciPy, cofounder of Anaconda). That credibility helps when you're reaching out to sponsors, speakers, and university partners. You're not building a random club. You're building a chapter of something real, backed by people with track records.

Playbooks. Everything we've learned from the Austin genesis chapter is documented publicly. Event formats, checklists, partnership guides, content distribution workflows, CRM setup, outreach automation. You don't start from scratch.

Brand assets. Logo, design system, templates. You stay on-brand while making it your own locally. There's no shortage of things to fork and take inspiration from.

Light sponsorship for early events. We'll help cover the first couple of events to remove the financial barrier. Campus events with a room, AV, and volunteers are genuinely cheap. The goal is to get you to the point where local sponsors take over.

The network. You're not building alone. You plug into a national (and soon global) community of chapter leaders, practitioners, and sponsors. What works in Austin, Bordeaux, or LA gets shared with you immediately.

Mentorship. Message Gary on Telegram (@garysheng) or X DMs (@garysheng) whenever. Early on, you can do a weekly call if you want. The communication cadence will evolve as we figure out what works, but you won't be left on your own.

Brand infrastructure. A Remotion repo with ready-to-use compositions for event flyers, promo videos, and visual assets. Clone it, swap your chapter's details (speaker names, dates, venue, co-host logos), and render. The compositions handle brand consistency for you. If you're not technical, you can also use the brand guidelines to create assets with Canva, Gamma, or whatever you prefer.

Discord. The community Discord for all chapter leaders, practitioners, and members to compare notes, share opportunities, and co-work across cities.

What's Expected of You​

Run events. The core of any chapter is regular events. Start with monthly. Every event is an initiation into the applied AI economy. The concept: you're giving your audience a landscape map. Practitioners who are actually making money in applied AI share their field notes. The audience leaves knowing what the paths are, what's real, and what's hype. The call to action is simple: join this community to compare notes, co-work, and share opportunities. Formats can vary (see the full catalog) but the through-line is always the same.

Add AAS national as a manager on every event. Whether you use Luma, Meetup, or both, add the national AAS account as a co-host or manager on every event page. This gives national access to the attendee list and lets us build a shared email list across all chapters. A strong national list benefits every chapter: it lets us promote your events to members in nearby cities, send national updates, and build the overall community.

Collect LinkedIn and GitHub on registration. When setting up your event registration, include fields for LinkedIn profile URL and GitHub username (optional but encouraged). This data flows into the national CRM and helps us understand who's in the community: what they build, where they work, what skills they have. That enrichment makes the whole network more valuable. When a business owner in Austin needs a practitioner with a specific background, or a chapter leader in LA wants to find local speakers, the CRM is how we connect the dots.

Find your local patron. Every chapter needs a local champion: a business owner, executive, or organization that believes in what you're building and wants to support it. This isn't a cold sponsorship pitch. It's finding someone who sees the value of a local applied AI talent network and wants to say "I planted this chapter." This usually happens naturally after your first couple of events prove the model.

Create stickiness. The north star metric for a new chapter is retention: 20 or more people who keep coming back across your first three events because the events are genuinely that valuable. If people come once and don't return, something needs to change. If they keep showing up, everything else (sponsors, growth, opportunities) follows.

Share what you learn. Write event recaps. Document what worked and what didn't. The whole system gets better when chapters feed insights back to the network.

Stay on brand. You have freedom in how you run your chapter. The required protocols for communicating with national are still being defined, but the principle is simple: use whatever tools let you flow and get things done as a local organizer, and keep us in the loop on how it's going.

The Opportunity​

This is worth saying plainly: building a chapter puts you at the center of your city's applied AI economy. Every practitioner, every business owner, every sponsor who cares about applied AI in your area will flow through your events.

The network you build is yours. The relationships, the reputation, the deal flow, the career flow, the knowledge flow. We call it enlightened self interest: you're building something that serves your community and your career at the same time.

Chapter leaders don't just organize events. They become the person everyone calls when they need applied AI talent, when they have a project to staff, when they want to understand what's possible. That's a powerful position to hold, and it compounds over time.

The people who figure out applied AI now, while the gap is wide open, will be the ones everyone else calls in two years.

How to Get Started​

  1. Read the docs. Start with What is the Applied AI Society? and the Applied AI Canon. If the philosophy resonates, keep going.
  2. Read the playbooks. Browse the chapter leader playbooks to see what running a chapter actually looks like.
  3. Reach out. Hit up Gary Sheng directly on Telegram (@garysheng) or X DMs (@garysheng). You can also get in touch here.
  4. Have a conversation. We'll talk about your city, your network, what format makes sense, and what support you need.
  5. Run your first event. We'll help you get the first one off the ground. From there, you're building.

See Also​