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I am going to respectfully disagree with several of the opinions presented here.
1. The AI process has nothing in common with the NPHC grad process except the most superficial resemblamce. To compare the two is to insult the NPHC process and lend a glamour to AI it doesn't warrant, or need.
2. AI is not hard at all. In fact its really easy. As long as you fit within the category AI was originally designed.
AI was created for a national organization to be able to choose to add members as special initiates that weren't normal undergrads.
Specifically, mothers of undergrads, graduated colony members, local sorority alums of new chapters, faculty advisors, other helpful advisors of chapters etc.
IT also allows the special intiation of "name droppers" or people with some dewgree of fame that it would look good to the national to have on its roles.
To a lesser degree it also provided a way for alumnae chapters to recruit people into the group that had been really helpful to their existing operations.
If you fall under any of those special initiate categories, AI is a breeze. Easy as Pie.
And almost every single group has a mechanism for allowing those types of special initiates.
So what you could say, is that in some ways AI is supposed to be a recognition of service already rendered to the sorority.
Where AI gets hard for people, is when you don't fit into a category where the national has sought you out specifically.
Where AI is hard, is when you don't have any dealings with the sorority, aren't working with any chapter in a service role. . . and well to sum up, have no personal relationship with the sorority, its chapters or members at all.
In that case it can be a tedious process because you have to contact them out of the cold and try and bend a process to help you that wasn't for the most part designed with you in mind.
Nothing else about it is "hard" in the way that word is commonly used. And to say that, diminishes the undergrad that pledged in college. Her selection was even harder because she had to deal with a directly competitive process.
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