Which are the top AI tools for event planners?

If you haven’t heard of Fathom, Gamma and Spark AI, then perhaps it’s high time you did. These AI-based tools for meeting planners were explored during a recent SITE webinar, outlining what they offer and how planners can use them to their advantage. Fathom is an AI notetaker, Gamma an AI presentation and website builder and Spark AI is an all-in-one tool.

As Tim Altbaum, CEO of event production company Vario Productions highlighted, AI is not coming after your job, but someone who uses it better than you is, so it’s vital to stay up to speed with the latest technology.

Video conferencing tech Fathom, for example, enables event professionals to record, transcribe and join meetings and it works across Teams, Zoom, and Google.

“It can summarise everything from the meeting, providing bullet points of the topics, who the presenters and the attendees were, allowing you to really enhance your workflow and be more ‘present’ in your meetings,” said Altbaum.

Altbaum highlighted how the paid version of Fathom can help planners to sort through conversations chronologically, offering different sections to click on, which can be particularly useful when preparing RFPs.

“Anytime you click to go to a section, it jumps forward in the video to that specific section,” he said. “I don't necessarily have to sit on a call with my team members and ask for a recap. I'll quickly glance at where the action items are, the questions that were asked and their subsequent answers as well as go into the transcript and see where specific topics were covered.”

Gamma, a website and slideshow builder that simplifies content creation, can be especially helpful for those planning conferences and wanting to create slide decks. Planners can ‘feed’ the app certain elements of information, such as the aim of the conference, location and number of attendees, and the AI functionality will then generate an outline. Planners can also access a variety of prompts, such as making the content longer, simplifying the language, adding images and being more specific.

“It suggests different ways that I should be working to make this a much more cohesive presentation,” said Altbaum. “You can go into each deck, and you could add pictures, subtract pictures, change fonts and layouts.”

Marco Cadenas, regional director of sales Dominican Republic & St. Martin at Amstar DMC said Gamma can help to make planner presentations bolder and more impactful and that the app can search for existing images stored on your computer or it can source these from the web.

For those who might be new to planning a conference, Spark AI can be a useful tool because of the number of prompts incorporated within the technology. The webinar highlighted its time-saving functionality, its ease of use and guided questions and the fact it can organise and summarise various event planning tasks. Maca Murillo, team leader at Premio Experiences, Premio DMC said the time-saving aspect was invaluable, with the webinar demonstrating how Spark AI can create session timetables, incorporating timings, locations and descriptions.