The Scene Room
The Scene Room Podcast spotlights the movers and makers redefining the performing arts—focusing on innovative marketing, leadership, and the importance of collaboration. Hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman, with a keen eye on audience trends and cultural shifts, the goal is to explore how artists and organizations are connecting with communities, shaping the future, and redefining what it means to engage and inspire.
The Scene Room
Ben Dietschi — The AI Revolution in Arts Administration
The transformative potential of artificial intelligence in arts management takes center stage in this forward-thinking conversation with Ben Dietschi, Senior Consultant at the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management. Drawing from his extensive experience as the former Executive Director of SoundStreams and his current project developing AI training programs for arts administrators and organizations, Dietschi offers a compelling vision of how cultural organizations can adapt to an increasingly digital landscape.
The discussion opens with Dietschi's personal journey into arts administration, sparked by a profound moment during a high school band performance when he witnessed the emotional power of music to transform an audience. This formative experience shaped his career trajectory and his commitment to helping arts organizations maximize their impact through effective business structures.
At the heart of our conversation lies what Dietschi terms a potential "relevancy crisis" facing arts institutions. As digital entertainment options become increasingly sophisticated, accessible, and often free, cultural organizations must reconsider their value proposition. Dietschi challenges arts leaders to think boldly about creating experiences that will resonate with future generations while remaining authentic to their artistic missions.
The podcast explores several cutting-edge concepts including venture philanthropy, which creates a middle ground between traditional donations and profit-seeking investments. Most significantly, Dietschi shares insights from his current work leading an AI lab for arts organizations, where studies suggest potential productivity gains of around 40% across various administrative functions - a game-changing prospect for an industry that has historically struggled with efficiency constraints.
While acknowledging ethical concerns around AI, particularly regarding copyright and artistic integrity, Dietschi advocates for a pragmatic approach that integrates these powerful tools within organizations' missions rather than resisting technological change. His balanced perspective encourages thoughtful adoption while respecting organizational values and the creative community.
Whether you're an arts administrator, board member, or simply interested in the intersection of technology and culture, this episode offers valuable insights into how traditional institutions can embrace innovation while preserving their core artistic values. Subscribe to The Scene Room for more conversations that explore the evolving landscape of arts management and cultural leadership.
All episodes are also available in video form on our YouTube Channel. All episodes are hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman.
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Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to the Scene Room. Today I have Ben Dietschi here. He is a senior consultant with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, where he assists arts and culture organizations in reaching their full potential. Prior to joining the Institute, ben served as executive director of SoundStreams, canada's leading contemporary music and opera producer. I have followed Ben's career since his SoundStream days and he is really doing fascinating things. We focused the conversation today on AI because he is developing an AI training program for arts administrators. If you're enjoying the Scene Room podcast, please like it, share it, review it, do any of those things. It really helps keep these conversations going. Thanks for your support. And now let's get to the conversation. Ben, welcome to the scene room.
Ben Dietsche:Good to be here.
Elizabeth Bowman:I followed your career from your sound stream days, so it's really nice to talk face to face on this podcast.
Ben Dietsche:Likewise, that's very kind. You too Definitely seen you bouncing around everywhere and making the arts better, so thanks for doing this, and I was saying in our pre-chat that it's just great that there's a podcast about the arts. It's missing, so it's great to be here.
Elizabeth Bowman:Tell me about your journey into arts administration, because this is unique to everyone, obviously, but upcoming emerging arts administrators or people who are thinking about jobs in the arts, who may be musicians or dancers or artistic people in general who are interested in the business side. How did you cross over or get into it? I assume you must have music education.
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, I think for a lot of us it starts with getting sucked into the arts first and honestly, there's a specific moment I remember that happening. I was in high school. I was in band. I play the saxophone I still do and we were in one of those competitions. You know where you go in to earn trophies and have sort of Mr Holland's opus band director. It was all very intense. At a point in the piece we were playing I think it was a Percy Grainger thing the audience started to weep, like two thirds of the room, for real, like this. This happened and it, just in a moment, made me understand how powerful the arts are.
Ben Dietsche:And that might sound overly poetic here, but it really just. There was a paradigm shift for me.
Ben Dietsche:And since then that's just been. The motivator is the power of the ability to change people in a moment and then, you know, a little bit, forever. So that's where it started. But then performing, I just was always the person thinking about the context of the audience and like how did they get here and how do we create that change? And all the conditions around what's happening on stage were just my natural place to be pulled to, which then immediately get pulled into the business structure, right, like how to create a healthy business to support all of this. So it was very natural, just sort of tractor beam pull into that side of things. And I first was an independent producer and then found SoundStreams who you know was the one that took the coffee with me and then was there working my way up the ranks until I was the executive director and then now moving on to consulting for arts leaders around the world.
Elizabeth Bowman:So tell me about the consulting who do you work for and what exactly does that mean?
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, which means it means nothing at first. Right, I work for the DeVos Institute of Arts Management. We're a consultancy and I think it's pretty special because we work with individuals, we work with groups and we work with whole communities, and by that I mean we have a fellowship for executive directors in the summer. We do work with individual organizations, like you'd expect, with strategic planning and marketing plans and fundraising plans. We also do lots of interim work, like I'm often with my colleagues, doing turnarounds, like we go in and help reinvigorate organizations, which is really rewarding and as hard as it sounds. And then we do these programs with whole cohorts of organizations in cities and regions, and we did a huge project right through the pandemic with a couple hundred organizations across the state. So doing all of that, as you can imagine, it's quite an adventure. It keeps me busy, so I really appreciate just the element of service and consulting honestly like being able to amplify that impact and hopefully make things a little better for all those organizations.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's been pretty rewarding organizations and, in particular, with your current position, what trends are you seeing for arts organizations, institutions and how they approach long-term stability like sustainability and the change in this current market?
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, it's the million dollar question. I mean, look, really, if we boil it down fundamentally, it's a potential relevancy crisis. If we're looking long-term right, it's just to say that really, the nature of engagement with entertainment and the arts and culture is shifting forever with digital substitutes, and this we all know. But this we must face in new ways. We really need to be bold here. We can expect in the years ahead for there to be ever more compelling and free and low cost options that are delivered right to your face, to your phone, to your home. I think we really need to take that seriously and think about what are the experiences, the nature of the experiences that the next generation wants to experience. Using that word experience four times tells you that the experience economy is a real thing, you know.
Ben Dietsche:I think about immersivity, I think about multi-sensory experiences, I think about digital mediums and I think about all those things somehow not being just buzzwords for organizations that are rooted in the classical arts. How do we bring these things together in ways that are authentic for those missions and just really try to make sure we're having a conversation that's going to be relevant longer term for the next generation? I think about that the most. And then there's definitely other trends. I mean the great wealth transfer. We're like in the middle of it now and you can feel it. We're in those rooms seeing those conversations change. It's new faces, it's the next generation and they want different things. A lot of people are talking about venture philanthropy, you know, and impact bonds, and how can we create a conversation around impact that's going to really resonate in a new way? That's on my mind as well. There's so many other things we can talk about, but those are two big ones, I think.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can you talk about venture philanthropy for people who might not understand it?
Ben Dietsche:Right, yeah, I get wonky like right away you got to pull me back. Pretty exciting to remains to be seen, I think, if it is an idea that materializes on ground level. But what we're basically saying is there's these family offices and you know they've got their donation part that they're going to do of their wealth each year, and then maybe that foundation has an investment arm typically, and maybe the investment arm's not even talking to the philanthropy arm, so they might be in the same thing, donating for an environmental cause and then investing in oil companies, like directly or overweighting in that or something. It's just trying to bring it into more of a spectrum where you have somewhere in the middle, the idea that we're giving money. That's actually capital, it's seed capital.
Ben Dietsche:We we want some part of it back, probably. We maybe want it back at 0% interest or way below market level interest. But it allows, I think, the family offices or whoever is planning this, if it's an institution as well, to think about that capital being given in a different way. And so I think that's nice to think about this spectrum between pure profit investing right over to philanthropy and what we could do in the middle. I'm not one of the people working on that issue, but there are definitely things to watch in that space if you're in the charitable arts sector.
Elizabeth Bowman:That makes me think of instrument investments because obviously, well, I'm married to a violinist, so the topic of violins and violin sales in the market and those as an investment. These instruments are becoming too expensive even for the musicians themselves to own, but the return on investment for these instruments is huge for investors. So when you think of an orchestra today and the sound of that orchestra and the impact of the sound of that orchestra with these amazing instruments that people can't afford, so how is it going to change the sound of those orchestras if only economical instruments can be played? Right? But then you think of this venture investment strategy and this is a wonderful opportunity I'm just going to shout it out on the podcast to buy these wonderful instruments and the return on investment is massive.
Ben Dietsche:So do some research no-transcript linearly, and so when these products first came out and they were kind of janky and sort of like a fancy autocorrect, nobody was thinking about the transformative power, definitely not in the arts. I took an interest to it and did an introductory sort of exploratory seminar in our fellowship, and my president at Brett Egan at the DeVos Institute is also very interested in this. So short of it is yeah, we're doing this lab where we're bringing together 10 organizations right now, just from America. The point here is there's studies coming out of like Harvard and MIT that are taking a wild swing at what the productivity gains could be from this, and it looks like the number is around 40%. So if you just marinate on 40% more human resource capacity in whatever area and we can talk about that too you know what amazing transformation that would produce.
Ben Dietsche:In an industry that has this perennial productivity problem where it's never going to be more efficient to do a symphony, we need to support that same amount of labor now, 200 years in the future. It's not the same as making cars right. So what can we do to supercharge the capacity of organizations in other ways? So I'm very geared up about this and really excited to just bring together some minds that are in the field, that are willing to work on this, that are at different stages of implementing this technology, work through the governance, risks, the policy you know the ethical framework, but also right into practical things. What are we doing in programming and marketing and community outreach and board engagement? You know financial planning and modeling. We really want to dive in and see what's possible.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, that's wonderful that you're doing that work. I've spoken on the podcast a few times about how AI might transform the way we analyze data or data. Everyone data data, you know. I keep calling it data. Anyway, I think it will transform the way that we analyze data and we haven't had the budgets to have necessarily data analysts working in organizations like smaller organizations, midsize organizations, obviously. Maybe the bigger size organizations might be investing in that. But what specific things have you found, like, have you found some programs, or what exactly are you finding?
Ben Dietsche:I think, just to your point, one of the most exciting things broadly is the being able to use unstructured data in an intuitive way, and you're absolutely right that midsize organizations don't have someone that can help them structure and assemble their data in a way that's useful. They're accumulating it now usually because that's pretty easy to do, but to be able to just, with natural language queries, use databases in new ways, move data around, clean them up, it's really exciting what you can think about doing. I was just I popped into the chief information officer conference in the arts which exists, by the way that was at the Shaw Festival Theatre, hosted there last week, and there's just a lot of talk in the room about this sort of thing. I'm seeing really two approaches One is that we're okay with just a certain set of tools and the other is really trying to tackle how we're going to be using the technology in terms of policy in the organizations.
Ben Dietsche:I think that's the better way to go. We can't go by the tool, because the tools are evolving and changing on a daily or weekly basis. So I'm excited to think with organizations about the use cases and the specific tools. I think as if you're getting into this, you might start by looking at what we would call the frontier models. That's the really exciting boundary pushing companies that are always working on what that next bit of functionality is going to be. That's your open AI right. Mainly is, I think, the leader in that.
Ben Dietsche:There's also, of course, google's product. That's really great. Gemini. There's Cloud, which is another chatbot that's keeping up for sure. So you can think about testing out all of these things, and I think it's more about building the muscle of how to use it. It's like using an instrument right. A lot of people are still stuck a year or two years ago in a mentality where we're thinking about prompts and we're really just kind of putting our toe in the water. But the more you push into this and the more you think about interacting with these things the way you would with a junior staff person, you can really find use cases in multiple departments. I'm happy to talk about those if you want to go that deep into it, but I think it's really exciting to build up that sort of skill and capacity in managers so that they can start thinking more imaginatively about the uses.
Elizabeth Bowman:When I think about some, I mean there are a myriad of uses, obviously but when I think in terms of the branding structure of an organization, particularly, maybe specifically to do with the way that that organization uses language and communicates a message or tries to integrate their mission and vision into everything that they're putting across to their audience.
Elizabeth Bowman:So in terms of the customer first communication line, I imagine AI could be quite useful in terms of putting a filter onto what text a junior staff might be using, for instance, to communicate with a customer. You know what I mean, Just as we. You know, I joked on the last episode about putting my email in and making it more polite into hat, GPT or whatever. You could probably filter it into sort of a branding model and then suddenly your organization has a voice and speaks a certain way. Obviously you would have to have the human element to correct and manipulate that text to work in the exact way that you want to communicate, because we don't want to replace humans, but just in terms of getting that consistent messaging across, it's quite interesting.
Ben Dietsche:It's really exciting to think about the brand voice and the specificity with which we can now talk to different segments, which was something typically reserved for much larger marketing departments. So I'm absolutely with you there. I think actually quite easy to start that work and to have multiple personas served really well by midsize organizations now. But you know, there is this labor disruption point that you talked about. We could dig into that if you want. You said give, give this tool to the junior staffer to use. I think there's a couple interesting things to think about. You know, I was just talking to some software engineers a couple of weeks ago at a party and they said my job has changed. I no longer am a coder, I supervise AI coders, essentially right.
Ben Dietsche:And they were being honest, there was nobody to impress in the room. So I think we can expect the same thing, which sounds exciting, actually, if you skip over the mundane work and you get people more elevated in what they're doing. But the gap that I see that's the most important to fill is you know, you still need a way for people to learn basic skills, and so what do we do if the job starts at tier four and you have the chatbots doing all of the remedial, writing or whatever else you had to do, say, to learn in marketing or even in fundraising the parts of it that are back office? So I think we're going to have to be careful in both the education sector post-secondary preparing talent and then also how we think about onboarding and training junior staff in a very different way, and it has to be intentional. Otherwise I think we're going to end up with big skill gaps. Does that make sense?
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, it totally makes sense. I mean, even I have a daughter in fourth grade and a son in first grade, but he's not writing anything yet in terms of essays and that kind of thing. You know, she's growing up in an environment that there is chat GPT and she's aware of it and it's very important that these young kids don't use chat GPT to write a paragraph. I mean, you need to just write a paragraph and how to write. It's going to be a huge barrier for these kids who are growing up in this generation if they use these tools without learning themselves how to write and how to make an argument and exercise that part of your brain.
Ben Dietsche:I mean more than anything. I think we have to build people that are critical thinkers and have social skills. Now, like, I think it just boils down to needing droves and droves of that and recognizing that we can't really expect to be successful in the world if we're just leaning on more basic competencies. So I think some huge transformation coming, you know, not just in productivity but in how we prepare people for their working lives.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, ai is certainly a compliment and not a replacement. So, on that note, what do you think the greatest risks are, you know, in terms of ethics and all of these question marks we have in terms of the copyright and whose voice we're using, and, like there are, there are no precepts in place right now around AI.
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, I think arts organizations are forgive me for saying a bit too risk averse. Most nonprofits are. It's really frustrating, in a way, being on the back foot all the time whenever there's an innovation, and I would just like for this to be one opportunity where we get out in front of this. I'm going to then address, of course, the ethical point. I understand you know why artists in particular it's a real sore spot here because all of this information has been stolen. But I think the genie is out of the bottle.
Ben Dietsche:I don't think the answer is to sort of try to resist this tidal wave of change. I think we have to understand that these billion-dollar companies are going to address legality over time. It's frustrating that they are cutting first and asking questions later, but we just have to think about a world where we're the last organization left that's resisting, using tools that have potentially a 40% productivity gain. So where I think we need to start with this is just recognize that the genie's out of the bottle and then ask what is our mission asking us to do, what are our organizational values asking us to do in terms of the way we approach that mission, and then ask how AI fits into that. And so we have a seminar in our program that's going to address all of that. You know, I think just starting that conversation on the governance level and really working through it so that you start to have a framework to be able to experiment and innovate within.
Ben Dietsche:But I would posit that you know we can't go backwards. And I'm still sort of hearing this dialogue. It's just sort of a resistance to this. I don't know that that's the right answer. I want things to be easier for arts nonprofits. I don't want them to have to try to solve all of the world's problems, maybe just the ones within their mission, right? So that's how I come to the conversation which some people disagree with. But I think we ought to think a little bit practically that way as well.
Elizabeth Bowman:Still thinking about these tools in mind and how they will help organizations, I want to ask you about talent development and succession, because some organizations don't really think in terms of succession planning, and how might these tools help?
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, it's really interesting when you think about this landscape still in Canada, where we have many founder led organizations of a sort of precarious size, if I may say, and we need to really think about what that means, of course, in America too, but I just I think of it in Canada because of the timing right. There was a period in which a lot of these organizations were born and they're now at that point where everybody needs to be retiring soon. Some succession planning is really about the organization and its people really thinking through this, and it doesn't have anything to do with AI, in my view. I'm thinking on the spot about this.
Ben Dietsche:I haven't thought about succession planning in AI. I think the one place where it would probably be helpful is participating in creating institutional memory in interesting ways. Again, think about the way that we use unstructured data. I think about the treasure trove of notes and curatorial planning documents and things that, for example, artistic directors accumulate, and how that's not really useful for anyone coming in who's busy, who needs to get working on next year's season, but could potentially be really interesting if there was a bespoke bot that has learned everything, hoovered up all the information about the organization and its artistic planning over the last 30 years and can give pretty good answers to was this program before and what else was on the program, find interesting relationships between things. I think it helps build infrastructure in that sense.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's what I was thinking. There might be some sort of bot. Of course we don't want people necessarily in our emails and that kind of thing, but if you did jump into a role as executive director of an organization and you didn't have the setup that the Royal Conservatory just had which the whole one year of overlap for Alex Brose and, you know, having Peter Simon there for an entire year that's an amazing opportunity. But if you don't have that opportunity, it would be cool to ask the specific chat bot questions Like who would my predecessor have contacted about XYZ? And then the bot says well, your predecessor had a five-year relationship with this organization and this person works for this and that and this and they are connected to this and that and that I mean, of course. Then you're getting into this question of ethics, because they can't really get that information without connecting with the work emails.
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, I think there's a brilliant idea. You should patent this and I think I think you should connect to the emails. I think that's really interesting. I mean, that's the ongoing sort of steady stream stream of consciousness daily. You know connections could be built from all of that in a really interesting way. I think that's a great point. There's a more official way you can think about a repository that's like a knowledge base, right, maybe that's even public facing or something. But then these internal ways you can use unstructured data. I think boundless what that could do. It's really great.
Elizabeth Bowman:Also with large organizations, like we'll say, for example, the Metropolitan Opera. It's a massive organization. It would also be interesting to know which departments are also communicating with that other organization. Like maybe Sheila in development has a close contact at this organization, but also Margaret in marketing is using another contact at that same organization. And how can you maximize the potential for that relationship between those businesses, whereas we wouldn't necessarily know about them communicating with one another without a formal outward facing announcement?
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, exactly.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, there's a lot of that going on, so yeah, I guess that's a cool idea. The organizational chat box.
Ben Dietsche:Yeah, no, you can count on that. Someone in Silicon Valley is working on that already, so I'm sure we'll see that. It's a great idea.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's why I love this podcast. All right. Well, in terms of arts management programs, what do you think should be taught right now, Like? What do you think should be the focus for these upcoming administrators?
Ben Dietsche:You know, we're really accelerating into this place where the quote unquote 21 C skills are everything. So I just think about emotional intelligence being something that it's going to be very difficult for AI to catch up to for a very long time, to the point where most people can't imagine it. I can imagine it actually being a point where we can't distinguish that as well in terms of human, non human, but for a while I think that's really really important in interpreting how our actions fit into a context of values and a community, and this is very nuanced. Some of it is impossible to even put into language. So we know for sure that's going to be really important. And then just critical thinking being able to absolutely assess, synthesize vast amounts of information really quickly and do so as a human in the loop is the term that we hear. Right, we want to keep everything human centered.
Ben Dietsche:How do we have people coming out of arts administration schools with those skill sets? I think it's super important. You know the business acumen has to be there, but as someone that learned that in the wild, I think there's multiple ways you can get that and it certainly isn't the wild. I think there's multiple ways you can get that and it certainly isn't the answer. I've worked with people that have MBAs that just don't seem to see the big picture that they need to see to be successful and don't see the dynamics of an environment and how the people fit into that as the way to achieve goals. I think those soft skills and critical thinking skills are just absolutely important in the world that we're now entering into.
Elizabeth Bowman:What are your thoughts on LinkedIn in terms of communication tool for arts organizations and arts administrators?
Ben Dietsche:Feels kind of like the last social media space that isn't annoying. It's the one I actually enjoy. I think it's really interesting. I started out I'm not a social media guy per se, but I work in marketing often and I think it's fair to say I started out I'm not a social media guy per se, but I work in marketing often and I think it's fair to say it was just sort of a boring, empty, dusty wasteland for a long time, but it has become a very generative space. I think there's a lot of really interesting thought leadership. I think that you can really see what's happening in other industries and look for connections and see what's happening in the arts. I think it's productive. I haven't seen it as an audience builder per se yet I don't know that people are going there for that but as an industry tool to share ideas. Obviously that's its core purpose. It's really effective, really effective, and has sort of stayed on track that way, whereas other platforms seem to have kind of devolved a little bit in the last 10 years.
Elizabeth Bowman:What's one mindset shift or practical step you think arts leaders should take today to prepare for the future that we're walking into?
Ben Dietsche:I think, if I was to impossibly answer your question about one mindset shift that we should have as we head into this future, it's that leaders need to make time in their day to reflect. Leaders need interstitial time to think deeply about the decisions that they're making. It's always been the trope that the CEO or executive director has everything flying at them all the time, but now I fear that the information landscape is such that we really aren't taking time to think. So just schedule some time in your day to step away from your desk and look out the window and think about the things you need to think about that day. I promise the decisions will have a depth and a nuance that will pay dividends of that time back a hundred times. Whether you meditate or don't. It's really just about making sure that we aren't just answering everything with a half sentence in our mind and we're really thinking a little more deeply about the dynamics of the decisions that we're making.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I think that's good advice Long walks they help.
Ben Dietsche:Is that your way to do it?
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, sort of I guess long walks runs, whatever, but getting outside fresh air, I think, definitely is something that gets the brain going in a productive and clear way.
Ben Dietsche:Love it. Yeah, long hikes for me too, when things get really complicated. It's, that's the way, I'm sure of it.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I always joke that the answer is in the mountain. All right, thanks so much for being here today. It's been really great to chat with you.
Ben Dietsche:Really fun. Thanks so much, Liz.
