How AI Will Transform Events

Stefan Deeran is the co-founder and COO of Vendelux, a leading AI platform for event marketers and conference organizers.

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Business networking events and conferences are expected to return to pre-pandemic levels this year, but they’ll look different than they did in 2019. And believe it or not, that’s because of AI.

For the past two years, McKinsey’s annual State of AI survey respondents reported that they had integrated AI into business operations. Sales and marketing are among the top areas for investment, and for good reason: Seventy percent of survey takers increased revenue thanks to mechanization, and 28% also reduced costs.

Strategic organizations have discovered how leveraging AI for sales and marketing puts people first. Automating tedious, repetitive and time–consuming processes gives sales reps more time and energy to focus on personal outreach.

However—and to state the obvious—networking hasn’t been the same since 2020 when the pandemic simultaneously made handshakes verboten and caused AI adoption to kick into overdrive. 2023 is poised to be a breakout year for AI-powered events.

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For the past year or so, it’s been noticeable how much people have missed the regular hustle and bustle of blockbuster events. At Vendelux, we’ve seen an uptick in in-person attendance since the summer of last year. In 2023, we expect momentum to fully pick back up as RSVPs skyrocket and competition for floor space heats up to pre–pandemic levels.

To justify the expense, event organizers and planners must design better experiences for speakers, sponsors and attendees. Ultimately, attendees need to generate enough meetings to generate ROI from IRL marketing. Luckily, event intelligence has made strides in recent years. Activities that would have been unimaginable a decade ago will soon be par for the course.

Event planners, for instance, now have access to unprecedented levels of attendee data. They can use this information to segment groups and plan activities based on demonstrated areas of interest. On a more granular level, organizers can employ intelligent registration systems to gather data that essentially curates a guest’s experience. Imagine greeting registrants with a personalized swag bag or hosting a cocktail hour where attendees are served their drink of choice without having to order.

Technologies more readily associated with AI will also impact production. For example, a recent experiment by Skift found that Open AI’s ChatGPT is remarkably good at generating event content. Simple, straightforward prompts (e.g., “Write an email inviting companies to sponsor a new conference about using AI in the events industry”) yielded cogent text for emails, blog posts and even welcome speeches.

When it comes to assigning titles to names and names to faces, sales representatives and sponsors also have access to new tools. In the past, event preparation was an arduous task that involved searching disparate databases for information on target contacts. Even the most meticulous planners often found that key people who were supposed to be in attendance at events weren’t or were impossible to find in packed crowds.

Machine learning-enabled processes that live in a singular, trusted environment simplify the investigative legwork necessary to pre-book meetings at events. Semantic search technology is a game-changer when you’re a sales or marketing team starting from scratch. Your ideal customer, for example, might be called a “growth engineer,” but this person can go by many alternative job titles.

Suppose you’re looking for contacts who fill that role within their organization. In that case, it’s possible to conduct an intelligent keyword search that yields a list of verified growth engineers, plus the titles on their LinkedIn profiles. From there, predictive modeling makes it easy to search for events that key prospects are attending. And because it’s always a good idea before hitting the floor to double-check that the contacts you’ll be looking for are, indeed, the contacts you’re looking for, entity resolution capabilities reconcile names with roles, titles and even nicknames. Gone are the days of wandering the maze and searching for name tags. With the ability to anticipate the whereabouts of key connections, sales reps will save time and energy charting their own course.

Overall, we can expect that AI technology will facilitate more immersive, personalized events. For one, organizers are preparing for a future that involves more gamification and VR activations. On the flip side, it’s inevitable that pandemic–era standards for measuring ROI will persist. Finance departments will continue to keep a close eye on significant investments like in–person events.

But with people returning to conferences and summits en masse, it’s no longer a wise business decision to opt out. At the same time, it’s more important to choose events wisely. AI-equipped technology makes it easy to make smarter decisions backed by data. And per the same McKinsey report, it’s best to take a long-term view of the future—organizations that demonstrate continued commitment to AI-enabled transformation outpace competitors.

Thanks to AI, the future of events is here.

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