A standard is only worth who stands behind it
Cimbiotic exists to do one thing: give associations and non-profits an independent, credible answer to the question their members have started asking.
Why this company exists
Associations spent two years asking whether AI belonged in their operations. That hesitation has flipped, and adoption has outrun any plan to govern it. Roughly nine in ten professionals believe employees are already using AI in their organization. Fewer than half report a formal policy.
What makes that dangerous for a membership organization is not the technology. It is that member trust is not a soft value here — it is the balance sheet. It is why members join, why they renew, why they share their data, and why employers and regulators treat the credential as worth something.
There are governance platforms for enterprises and certification bodies for large companies. There was nothing built for an organization with fifteen staff, a credentialing programme, a volunteer board and a chapter network. Cimbiotic is that.
Rick Bawcum
CAE · CISSP · AAiP
Rick has spent eleven years working inside the association sector, and nearly three decades before that in enterprise technology and risk. He founded Cimatri in 2015 and led it as chief executive until 2026, advising associations and non-profits on technology strategy, data and operations.
He holds two credentials that rarely appear together: CAE, the association-management credential, and CISSP, the information-security certification. That combination is the reason Cimbiotic exists in the shape it does. Most AI governance material is written either by people who understand associations or by people who understand risk discipline, and it is usually obvious which.
He wrote Ethical AI for Associations, and was a contributing author on Ascend: Unlocking the Power of AI for Associations. He holds the Association AI Professional credential. Earlier in his career he held senior technology roles at Verizon Wireless, Iron Mountain and CapRock Communications, and served as chief operating and technology officer at Bross Group. He studied the implications of AI for business strategy at MIT Sloan.
Our relationships, published
We ask the organizations we assess to disclose how they use AI. It would be incoherent not to disclose our own commercial relationships, so here they are.
Rick founded Cimatri in 2015 and led it until 2026, and has held advisory roles across the Blue Cypress group of association technology companies. He is exiting both in September 2026 — before Cimbiotic takes on any assessment work — and will retain no ownership, advisory position or financial interest in either. No company that sells AI or technology to associations holds any interest in Cimbiotic, and Cimbiotic takes no fees, equity, revenue share or board seats from any company whose products it assesses or certifies.
Prior relationships do not disappear because a role ends. Where one exists — a former Cimatri client, or a product from a company Rick has advised — the relationship is stated on the face of the report, and the certification decision sits with our oversight committee rather than with Rick alone.
Cimbiotic also provides Board and Executive AI Advisory to a small number of associations. Those engagements are advisory — we advise on decisions, we do not make them or run anyone’s AI programme — and each one is disclosed here. We do not certify an organization we currently advise, or have advised in the preceding twelve months.
We considered putting the advisory work in a separate company. We decided against it. A second entity under the same ownership satisfies the paperwork and changes nothing real, and it is the same structural theatre we rejected when leaving a vendor group. We would rather state the relationship and accept the limit it places on who we can certify.
Sidecar and the AAiP credential
Sidecar’s Association AI Professional credential certifies people. Cimbiotic certifies products and processes. The two are complementary rather than competing, and Rick holds the AAiP credential himself. Any commercial arrangement between the organizations will be disclosed here.
We would rather lose a certification fee than have one questioned.
Four things you can hold us to
We do not sell AI
Cimbiotic takes no money from any vendor it assesses or certifies — no fees, no equity, no revenue share, no board seats. We have nothing to recommend you buy.
We publish our criteria
You can read the framework before you engage us, and so can anyone you show the results to. See the approach.
We can say no
We keep the right to fail an assessment and to withdraw a mark. That right is worth more to you than to us.
We say what we do not know
Where the evidence is thin, we say so. Where we are not yet accredited, we say so. A trust business that shades the truth about itself has no business assessing anyone else.
What nobody knows yet
No good survey asks association members directly how their organization’s AI use affects their view of it. The research we cite comes from professionals reporting on their own organizations, from directors, and from consumers in general. The closest stakeholder research sits in the charitable sector, and members are not donors.
The direction of travel is consistent and well corroborated. The precise percentages should not be quoted as though they were census data, and we try not to.
Closing that gap is part of why the founding cohort matters. In time, the aggregate picture across assessments becomes the sector research that does not currently exist.
Worth a conversation?
Thirty minutes, no obligation and no pitch deck. Sometimes the answer is that you are in reasonable shape and should spend the money elsewhere.