Many of you may have played around with ChatGPT over recent weeks and experienced the powerful potential of artificial intelligence in our lives. AI may have a hard time making meaningful inroads into the travel industry due to the deeply embedded legacy systems which are pervasive across the travel ecosystem. Meetings and events, on the other hand, has much less legacy technology and thus offers much more opportunity for AI. Meetings and events are ripe for AI disruption given the complexity of organizing meetings, supporting attendees throughout their journeys and considering a complex set of financials. Here are some of the ways that AI will begin to re-shape meetings and events processes and experiences in 2023. 

User experience – Planning an event is a very complex endeavor. For any event, you consider destination analysis, event design requirements, venue booking and logistics, accommodations, food and beverage, sustainability, transport. On top of that, there are corporate policies, preferred vendors and more. 

Imagine if you could type what you need into an AI prompt: “I need to plan a team offsite for 200 attendees in Nashville. We want to do the gathering at a unique venue, we need accommodations for 180, we want to do a celebratory dinner, and a cool local activity.” Based on this information, the AI autogenerates a recommended event design and agenda, serves up relevant venues for the event and accommodations, and a full range of save the dates and invites; and the AI could do this while working with corporation’s branding, booking rules, preferred venues and policies. This would be a game changing interaction model that could turn any person into an expert event planner.

Venue booking – AI has the potential to completely transform the venue booking process.  Most of the companies working on “instant booking” for meetings are still working through legacy technology frameworks which are extremely difficult to implement and adopt. With AI you could potentially eliminate the need for most of that infrastructure. AI could automate venue follow up based on existing response systems, reducing the labor and time involved for venues to respond. An AI-powered venue response system could also solve “Monday morning Tetris” where venues have to try to decipher booking changes they could make to optimize revenue. With AI, a clear decision-making framework could be implemented on modern technology rails. The net outcome of an AI system for venue booking would be to deliver the fastest venue response time for completely customized bookings that both serve the customer’s needs while also doing it at the lowest possible cost to venues. Gamechanger.

Attendee experience – Attendee experience is one of the most exciting opportunities for applying AI to meetings and events. We all know managing attendees is one of the most complex challenges with meetings. Tracking attendees, communicating with them in real-time, messaging with sensitivity, navigating unexpected local challenges, the list goes on. AI has the power to track and serve attendees dynamically, with white-glove personalized attention. Let’s imagine a situation where a group of panelists has a canceled flight and will miss their session, and now that panel session is being rescheduled to another slot later in the week. AI has the power to help rebook the panelists and help them every step of the way to their new route. AI can also inform the registered attendees for the session about the rescheduling with an accurate on-brand message. The net impact of this would be attendees and registrants who have never felt “more considered” and an unparalleled event experience.

Lead capture and relationship building – There are two primary reasons for meetings and events: one is to generate new leads (typically larger events) and the other is to build more meaningful relationships. AI can be powerful to accelerate success of these two missions by delivering targeting capabilities along with the highly personalized messaging needed to convert. For example, AI could build a profile on attendees based on their selections for that event (i.e. which sessions they signed up for, which hotel they selected, etc.) and recommend an agenda of booths to visit, and vendors could pay for highly personalized messaging to invite these attendees to visit their booth and automatically follow up with them afterwards and track the lead in Salesforce (for example) until conversion to revenue.

Measuring event ROI – The holy grail of the industry has always been to measure event ROI. This has never been truly achieved. AI has the potential to adequately cover the entire surface area of an event (costs, revenue, attendees) across a long enough tracking period and through all the various systems to actually start to uncover event ROI metrics for hosts and attendees alike.   

OK, not all of this will be realized in 2023, but the industry should be looking for innovators with the vision to make it happen.