
How will AI transform events?
How ready are you to embrace the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
AI has been moving forward in various industries, and event management is no exception. The use of AI in event planning and management has the potential to transform the industry by providing a more efficient, personalised, and data-driven approach.
AI and our improved ability to connect online are offering some interesting new formats. So how will AI transform events and complement human interaction? Improving the types, access, and variety of events, in this blog we look at what can we expect:
Streamlined planning: AI’s large language model generative tools, including Google’s Enigma and ChatGPT, are already proving to be very useful in helping with time-consuming administration tasks and communication with delegates. Plus, AI helps with streamlining the planning process to ensure key elements are not missed. We looked at this in our blog: How to Harness AI in Event Planning and Marketing:
… saving time, freeing up energy for more creativity and giving the ability to refine and improve processes. All of this helps you to plan and execute great events, delivering increased delegate satisfaction, data and meaningful feedback.
And data is key. Allowing event organisers to make more informed decisions about everything from reaching their target market for attendees to venue selection, scheduling, and efficient budgeting.
Audience targeting: through using key words to search for events that your target audience is attending, you can get a better understanding of them, your competition and emerging trends in venue and content delivery. Additional data on your target market will mean more purposeful and aligned events around the type of content that attendees value and how that’s delivered. It will also mean greater opportunities for personalisation.
Personalisation: pre-event surveys and accessing more publicly available data means more opportunity for you to tailor sign-ups and event experiences of delegates. AI can also aid with personalised recommendations for activities, speakers and networking suggestions based on job roles, shared interests, and backgrounds. It is likely that AI’s capability to deliver enhanced personalised delegate experiences will be the norm in the years to come. This type of personalised approach will blend with …
Real-time support: AI Chatbots have been used for some time and the next phase will be a far more sophisticated approach, something more along the lines of an AI Concierge. With the ability to answer many common questions from delegates, as well as pre-event and on-the-day support, an AI Concierge would suggest itineraries, ‘who to meet’, depending on who’s arrived and when, and catering suggestions with timings to beat the queues. Even booking a taxi to the hotel and evening activity suggestions! Combining this with real-time language translation services and events can become more accessible to a global audience.
Virtual Reality (VR): VR offers an immersive experience using headsets and hand-held sensors, delivering a variety of different and creative ways to bring experiences to life. Improving equipment and sector innovation means a growing appetite for events involving education, training, and VR demonstrations with the ability for event organisers to run parallel in-person and virtual events to reach larger audiences.
Event security: AI can help facilitate greater insight into attendee behaviour and preferences, from footfall to facial expressions. Facial recognition technology also allows event managers to enhance their security arrangements.
Sustainability: improvements to the optimisation of resource allocation and waste reduction, AI analysis could predict resource needs more accurately, helping to reduce overproduction.
Analysis: the ability to deliver post-event surveys and collate feedback, combined with data collected throughout the event itself will mean access to more in-depth data, giving you the ability to better assess satisfaction, and event impact and improve future events.
There is no doubt that AI can help us all up our game and its future role in event delivery will present us with some exciting and useful tools and will continue to grow. Yet, as we move into a more AI-powered world, we’ll need to balance its abilities with the need for accuracy, fairness, privacy, and genuine human connection. Using AI productively and appropriately is set to become an increasingly important part of an event organiser’s role.
We also delved into how to ‘Harness AI in Event Planning and Marketing’ in a recent blog. In this blog, we help you answer the questions you may have been asking: What is AI? What are the benefits of AI? And how can we utilise AI when planning and marketing our event?