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 By Tahira Endean Author, Event Instructor and Event Producer |
AI - Two letters that have changed how we plan events forever.
The possibilities for saving time on mundane tasks is one start. I recently went back to my roots as a Destination Management Company (DMC) and asked AI to build a program to take 100 incentive travel winners to Cabo. That took 6 seconds. In the next 6 seconds, it turned it into a table. An almost client-ready program grid. In less than a minute we had a letter to entice the sales team outlining the reward program, a gala dinner menu including local offerings in the destination and just for fun wrote a song for the opening including the names of the program stakeholders. Were they perfect? Probably not. But they are useable. If you are responsible for drafting the proposals, you have just saved about half a day and added a song to your client offering.
Can AI provide all the special human touches that take a program from a grid to a memory? Has it walked to the edge of the cliff and breathed the ocean air? Held a partner as the sun set? Felt the bubbles on its tongue after the champagne toast? Of course not, but your participants will.
"The innovation is in how we think about the data we have, how we are using it and what might make the difference in maximizing opportunities." |
Data. This is the language we need to speak today. The innovation is in how we think about the data we have, how we are using it and what might make the difference in maximizing opportunities. This is not registration counts or how many people gave an event a 4/5 ranking. This is about the ability to offer up data and have it examined in seconds for new patterns. These might range from how a venue’s space can be best utilized over a given period of time to maximize revenue, or new subsets for marketing and even managing the event to find both efficiencies and the extraordinary. |
Data validates the most important tool an event designer has, their ‘eventuition’. The magic of events comes from a combination of imagination and experience, but telling a stakeholder investing in your event that it will be ‘beautiful’ means… nothing. What anyone investing or invested in the outcomes needs to understand is not the theme or the colors or the menu, but what the outcome will be. How will your innovative ideas drive registration, and create engagement across the entire event and beyond, to what participants feel compelled to share? How will your out-there prototyped idea support the goals of the organization, align with participant needs and be measurable? If your idea is to test a new education format, use sentiment analysis in real-time to understand how your audience is affected by what is being presented, how it differs for men and women, by the age of the learner and their engagement levels depending on who is speaking. Now you have data you can use. Yes, this exists.
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Today’s tools give us the ability to measure accurately the responses to what we create. From heat mapping to the participant’s cognitive resonance and sentiment analysis, today’s innovative solutions for measurement give us a data set that lets us experiment with formats, innovating how education is delivered for today and into the future. For experienced designers, the ability to know how humans are reacting to entrances, focal points, surprises, time in quiet spaces, performances and presentations allows us to create experiences that resonate, create memories, drive traffic to our spaces and create repeat customers that want to share the story with others.
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"Data is key for understanding and validating if and how your ideas, methods and innovative spaces are working to deliver environments that meet the needs of a wide variety of guests and ultimately designing workplaces, meetings and full-scale events that are comfortable for the majority and allow productivity to flourish and joy to be found" |
When we are delivering messages to our stakeholders understand that every organization will have some need for innovation, and this need drives the why of hosting events. Humans are by nature collaborative, and true innovation still requires humans to identify and clarify the problem to be solved, to ideate and iterate solutions and to develop and prototype solutions. When we bring people together, it provides space for serendipitous collisions and for ideas to develop.
There is no replacement currently for what humans can do when they work together; meetings matter. Our work has value. We are not going to be replaced by AI but we do have to harness the power technology offers and use the insights available to continue to grow forward. Jump in, it’s fun!
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