If you’ve kept an eye on the news in recent days, you’ve seen plenty of talk about artificial intelligence. AI is on the rise, with significant advancements rolling out at an unprecedented pace. There are many perspectives to consider, from ethics to expediency. This is new territory for many industries — and event planning and marketing is no exception.
Topping headlines these days is ChatGPT, a language processing tool that takes the idea of chatbots to a new level. Not only can this technology answer simple questions, it can help humans perform more involved tasks, like writing code or crafting essays. (Rest assured that here at Redstory, our blog posts are all written by people.) There’s no question that AI can be incredibly useful in the right contexts. As event planners, how can we leverage this tool without losing the heart of what we do — connecting people? Even more importantly, can we use AI in events to boost human connection rather than minimizing it?
There’s a place for AI before, during, and after your events. As you incorporate this new frontier into your event strategy, remember that we should build events with technology for people — not build events for technology to shine.
As you’re creating and marketing an event, your to-do list can feel endless. AI automation can save you a lot of time (and brain power!) as you check off the details. For example, ChatGPT can help you create a list of potential sponsors or vendors with a few quick keystrokes, saving you from combing through Google results yourself to find relevant companies with great potential for partnerships. You can then use your extra time to research the elements of your event that require a human touch, like sourcing keynote speakers or honing in on your advertising audience.
Getting lots of attendee questions before your event? An AI digital assistant can quickly be programmed to answer common questions about your event location, ticket pricing, and accommodation options, allowing you to focus on the emails that only you can answer.
At the heart of every event is the desire to connect with attendees – to build loyalty between them and a brand, to educate them on social issues, to inspire them with leadership insights, or to connect them with like-minded individuals. At face value, AI may not seem to have much to offer here. In reality, though, AI can become your most powerful tool for connecting with your audience and making them feel valued. It’s all possible through the power of personalization.
You’re already familiar with personalization as a concept, from marketing emails that address recipients by their first name to ads that are targeted to a specific demographic. But using this concept in event settings can go the extra mile in creating a fantastic guest experience for everyone who walks in the doors. Here are just a few ways AI personalization can curate attendees’ experiences:
All of these options allow AI to work for you, the organizer, to give attendees a seamless and personalized experience. Rather than outsourcing the work entirely, you’re using a tool to minimize your own tedious tasks. Instead, you can focus on the on-site aspects that truly matter most without sacrificing guest experience.
After your event ends, AI can gather valuable insights from everyone who attended, and can even extrapolate further data from the answers it receives. This is a major time saver when it comes to understanding what your attendees want to see in the future.
Recent experiments have shown that AI created fantastic pre- and post-event surveys for sponsors and ticket holders alike. Anonymous responses generally provide more honest feedback, so using a chatbot to gather this information from your guests can give you the data you desire most.
It can be difficult to know how to use AI in event management, especially as the field continues to shift and evolve at a rapid pace. However, we believe that AI offers us a powerful resource to connect with others when it’s used well. There’s a misconception that technology is inherently isolating. In fact, technology backed by the power of human creativity is a force to be reckoned with.
At Redstory, we specialize in experiential events and marketing. We believe that humans are hardwired to crave genuine experiences and step into things that matter, and we strive to create those opportunities at every step. It’s true that we’re passionate about events, and we love leveraging the latest tech trends to create them. But even more than that, we’re passionate about people. If you want to highlight what matters most at your next event, we’d love to help you dream up an experience that runs on human connection. Reach out to our team to get started.