Oddmund Braaten is CEO at Interprefy, a multilingual meeting technology and services provider. Launched in 2015 with the idea of removing the need for interpreters to travel to venues to do their jobs, Interprefy has helped thousands of companies reduce their carbon footprint with remote simultaneous interpretation technology.
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) used to be the stuff of dreams for event planners, but with the introduction and growing popularity of tools such as ChatGPT, these dreams could soon become reality.
Launched by OpenAI back in June 2020, the AI-based chatbot is creating waves of excitement. With the ability to provide incredibly detailed and human-like responses to highly demanding queries, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way we gain information.
However, in the event industry, there are still many who question whether the technology will ever be ready for more creative and critical-thinking tasks. So could AI help plan your next event? And what does it mean for the role of the traditional event organizer?
A recent study showed that three-quarters (75%) of CEOs and business decision-makers feel that artificial intelligence (AI) would improve the events industry. Not only is there a clear appetite for tools that can help produce more exciting and engaging conferences, but there are also several different ways organizers can utilize the technology for their next event.
AI helps automate a lot of the repetitive, admin-type processes that conference organizers have to go through. For example, rather than having a human constantly monitor live discussion boards, AI-based chatbots can take care of any participant questions and make accurate suggestions based on their query. This frees up staff time to do more personal and proactive work, such as setting up live polls or taking care of any technical difficulties.
Why try and guess what potential attendees will want from your event when you can use AI to accurately predict it? For example, smart registration systems can look at factors such as location, demographic, age and interests to help inform content curation and speaker sessions. Forty-six percent of organizations featured in EventMB’s Event App Bible offered AI-powered attendee matchmaking, and the deep-learning capabilities of AI means it can also accurately suggest which sessions they should attend and which people to network with, and advertise relevant upcoming events.
AI-powered automated captions and speech translation technology can completely remove language barriers for events to increase audience accessibility and reach. By taking live speech and translating it into a language of the user’s choice in real time, attendees can enjoy any event and topic of discussion. The perfect live captions provider uses state-of-the-art AI engines and optimizes them to match your event’s content needs.
AI can gather a huge amount of measurable data that can be used to optimize future events and prove return on investment (ROI). For example, analyzing attendances during the event can show which sessions were more popular and created the most leads, which can then be used to drive future marketing campaigns. Through chatbots, registration forms and feedback surveys, AI can also allow event planners to collect and analyze data from a diverse audience that can help identify new trends and tips to improve upon.
AI apps can also help provide additional resources, reduce the impact of staff illnesses and save costs on part-time staff. We’re already seeing this with event check-in areas and digital signage boards, where AI can pick up some of the admin-level responsibilities while staff provide more personalized support. For attendees joining online, the hyper-personalization of AI can make it feel like they have access to their own assistant that knows exactly what they’re looking to get from the event.
While ChatGPT has certainly helped raise the profile of the potential future use cases of AI, there are plenty of opportunities event organizers can jump on right now to deliver more personalized and engaging experiences.
The arrival of ChatGPT and the continued popularity of AI could help drive the wider adoption of large language models (LLMs). The cornerstone of AI-based chatbots, LLMs, can form responses to queries as well as learn from historical data and information. So, rather than fielding basic customer support questions like some chatbots do now, one single LLM can provide various uses for an endless number of scenarios.
ChatGPT could inspire similar AI-based tech to become more widely adopted, for example, helping rapidly produce content for presentations, topic research and even source speakers. Until that time, however, by utilizing even just some of the AI-based tools that are available right now, event managers can make better-informed decisions today that can help optimize the events of tomorrow.
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