If you work in meetings or events, you’re all too familiar with the fact that one of the biggest challenges we all face is the number of areas in which we need expertise. Sourcing and negotiating venues and room blocks, creating event schedules, booking speakers, sourcing graphics - the list goes on and on, and the skills required for each task can be very different. We often wish there were two (or even more of us) to manage these tasks and skills simultaneously. So why not use automation to accomplish some of your more mundane daily tasks and simplify the process?
Since it entered the work sphere, AI (artificial intelligence) has been reshaping how we approach and conduct business. With continuous innovation and advancements, AI is helping professionals worldwide streamline their workload, better connect with clients, and create better plans for the future. Earlier this year, we published our Mastering AI blog, which discussed how optimizing AI prompts can help event planners reap the benefits of this robust and versatile tool. However, AI's function in meeting planning is much more than simply laying the foundation for a successful event.
Where to Start?
Over the past year, CoPilot, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini have become the go-to software for people when they think of AI. And for good reason! While paid upgrades exist, the free version of these platforms is a robust tool that any event planner can use immediately. Using prompts, AI can quickly analyze established guidelines, like CMP (Certified Meeting Professional) standards, and provide valuable insights that help you stay within those specific parameters. This capability allows AI to assist you in making informed decisions faster, boosting your efficiency in ways that manual processes simply can't match. Everything from sourcing relevant speakers for your event based on demographics and industry to suggesting the optimal layout for your banquet hall based on the number of people attending. Check out our Mastering AI blog for tips and tricks to maximize your experience!
Now if you’re looking for AI specializing in particular areas to enhance your event and attendee experience further, we’ve got you covered. In the blog below, we’ll look at how AI can help streamline specific aspects of your next event, improve your attendee experience, and collect insightful data to help you create smoother, more engaging, and more impactful future events.
Pre-event
Venue Sourcing: Most software can recommend host cities and venues within these cities based on the perimeters you provide. AI can offer the perfect destination and space for a successful event by considering critical considerations like the capacity, geographical locations of prospective attendees, desired attractions to engage your attendees during downtime, budget, and sustainability benchmark. Even better? Many event planning AI platforms, such as the popular Cvent or Nowadays, now offer automated tools to bid and book venue spaces for you! It’s like having a virtual assistant on your mobile device explicitly built to alleviate the typical headache of sourcing the perfect meeting space.
Marketing: With CoPilot, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini being amongst the most popular AI platforms, it should be no surprise that AI excels in text-driven campaigns. Everything from pre-event marketing to post-event feedback collection, AI is ready to help you craft a well-worded email to your audience for a resonating message that will get you the results you’re looking for. While ChatGPT can handle just about any text-related prompt you throw at it, there is no shortage of specialized platforms for you to choose from for an AI partner that best suits your needs. Software like Jasper is perfect for long-form text like speaker bios, blogs, social media posts, and content calendars. Need a catchy event name or hashtag for your event? Niche platforms like Namelix are perfect for generating memorable branded names for your event. There are even video assistance tools like Lumen5, which allow for easy drag-and-drop image creation and video editing, or Murf to give your marketing materials a professional AI voiceover - increasing both the production quality and DEI aspects of your event-related content. Don’t forget social media, either! Social media planning tools like Buffer can help create and schedule posts on whatever social media outlets you use, with built-in AI to write (or re-write) posts.
Event Schedules: Ensuring your attendees make full use of all the content your event offers is paramount to creating a successful event. Part of this means crafting an event agenda that avoids overlaps in sessions while simultaneously weaving in dedicated downtime for your attendees to digest their last breakout, get hydrated while catching up on a few emails, or network with their peers. Software like Clickup and Sched are designed with event planning in mind and come loaded with valuable templates to optimize your event's schedule. Using platforms like Read.ai, you can turn each breakout session into a summary of structured, actionable insights. Tools like these provide AI-generated summaries, transcripts, and highlights and aim to enhance the overall impact of your event’s must-see content.
It’s not just live events that benefit from this, either! For virtual or hybrid events, AI like Grip and Brella have dedicated hybrid event outlets that can adjust platform settings, host massive calls, and keep track of critical digital metrics (such as digital booth traffic or live stream analytics) that bring value to not just your virtual attendees, but your sponsors and future planning efforts as well. You can then take your virtual offerings a step further to ensure no one misses their highly anticipated session by utilizing AI to record and summarize all your digital broadcasts with programs like Rewatch.
Design: AI-powered design tools revolutionize how event planners create stunning visual content. Canva AI features provide templates and design suggestions, helping users quickly produce eye-catching marketing materials, presentations, and social media graphics. Similarly, Beautiful.ai can generate entire slideshows and presentations using key prompts, creating polished and compelling visuals that leave a lasting impression on attendees. These AI tools streamline the design process, allowing event planners to focus more on strategy and engagement while delivering professional-quality pre-event and onsite graphics!
On-site
Registration: Targeting bottlenecks and minimizing idle time for your attendees is a quick and straightforward way to get them into the heart of your event. One of the first bottlenecks attendees often encounter is registration once on-site, which coincidentally makes for an excellent spot for AI chatbots. AI can reduce friction while registering and help participants start the event on the right foot right out of the gate!
But more than making for a seamless registration, AI can actually help make the process more personalized while simultaneously collecting data for networking opportunities (discussed below), content recommendations, and internal post-event analytics. Hubilo and other comprehensive planning platforms like Bizzbo and RingCentral provide different AI applications in their registration offerings alongside features like matchmaking and attendee engagement analytics.
Networking: Countless surveys have shown that networking opportunities continue to drive attendance in the landscape of post-pandemic events. Leveraging AI to streamline your attendee’s networking experience can dramatically increase the value they get from your event. Robust suites like Bizzbo and RingCentral use AI-powered data to enhance networking opportunities for event attendees. By analyzing registration data and allowing attendees to define their objectives during registration, programs like this can match participants' profiles and interests to create tailored connections, ensuring a more personalized networking experience. This use of data to foster meaningful in-person connections is a simple change you can make on-site that can have a significant and lasting impact on your attendees, professionally and socially!
AV / Production: Atmosphere matters at every stage of an event, and there are AI tools to ensure you can seamlessly cultivate a comfortable, memorable experience for everyone involved. Soundraw is an AI-powered music platform that allows you to tailor soundtracks to fit the unique vibe of your event. With Soundraw, you can select the genre, mood, and duration to create the perfect audio backdrop. This tool provides a seamless way to set the tone and create an immersive experience at every on-site event stage.
For presentations and videos, professional-quality voiceovers can make a huge impact on both accessibility and engagement. In our marketing section above, we discussed Murf as an online voice generator tool that transforms written content into natural-sounding speech in just minutes. Still, other software like Speechify, WellSaid, or Respeecher can all work to solve your AI voiceover needs. Programs like these offer a variety of voices and languages and help you create polished audio that elevates any event AV production, like keynote presentations, instructional videos, or on-site event promotions.
Post Event
Data Analytics: Data is a goldmine, but sifting through attendee engagement metrics, demographic data, and post-event surveys can be time-intensive and even overwhelming if you’re not sure what data you can - or cannot- make use of. Many of the event planning software suites we mentioned above (like Cvent, Bizzbo, and RingCentral) and some we haven’t, like Domo, all come equipped with powerful data collection and analysis tools. The ability to pull in data from your event management tools can be used to identify insightful patterns and trends that might have otherwise been missed. Best of all? This type of analytics can often be aggregated in just seconds, saving you and your team a ton of time!
AI tools can analyze attendee feedback, track engagement across various sessions, and forecast future event attendance based on past data. Whether identifying the sessions that drew the most interest or predicting which marketing efforts were most effective, AI-driven data analytics allows you to fine-tune your strategy for the next event. With these insights at your fingertips, you can improve attendee experiences and create more impactful events moving forward.
