Meeting together: face-to-face is better. Photo Credit: Adobe stock/Bangkok Click Studio
AI has pros and cons, both of which will benefit the meetings
industry, said Nick Borelli, marketing director of tech provider Zenus,
which is working in partnership with Northstar to bring AI tools and
education to the latter’s events. When used effectively, AI can harness
and enhance the skills of meeting professionals.
Among negative consequences, deep fakes and other AI-enabled false
content are eroding confidence in anything we see online. As a result,
"in-person meetings will be the only oasis for truth that exists moving
forward," Borelli told an audience of more than 400 event professionals
during Northstar Meetings Group’s annual SMU International conference
this week in New York City.
How AI can benefit the events industry:
· AI enables fake digital content, making in-person events a crucial source of truth
- when you can create something with your fingertips that looks like
you have done something you haven’t, meeting in person has an elevated
value. People will grow increasingly distrustful of things they see
digitally. What we do is much more important, because bringing people
together is the only way we can know what is actually true.
· AI is the bridge from good to excellent meetings
- "I don't think any of you have ever planned an A+ event," Borelli
told the meeting professionals in attendance. "Just by a show of hands,"
he asked, "who here has too much time and resources?" The limits on
those two factors prevent us from reaching our full potential, he
surmised. "The B+ work you're doing isn't because you don't have
experience or because you don’t have vision; it's because you haven't
had the time and resources. AI is going to close the distance between B+
and A+."
· AI is your eager intern, ready to learn from your expertise
- Borelli suggested treating AI as an energetic and eager-to-please
intern. Your job is to provide the information it needs to successfully
complete tasks for you. "When an intern brings me back something that's
not ideal, that's on me because I didn't provide the right information
or guidance, said Borellli. In delegating a task to a person, he
typically asks, "Is there anything else I can give you to set you up for
success?" The same idea applies to prompts. After inputting
information, add: "Is there anything else I left out of this prompt that
would help you give me better results?" Often a generative AI platform
will tell you what else would be helpful to provide a more targeted
answer.
· AI lets you build your own team of "experts."
- Borelli works with a number of AI "assistants" that represent
different skill sets. They are named and tabbed in a browser for easy
access. "I don't have a lot of human team members. I don't have anyone
else to delegate this stuff to," he said, "but I do have an AI designer,
an AI copywriter… and so on. It makes me feel good to have a team
around me. When I work this way, my prompts might begin, "As if you were
my designer..."
· AI can do things in seconds that would take you hours or days
- with your detailed input, ask AI to build an event budget, create a
baseline agenda, match exhibitors with buyers, plan menus and sort
satisfaction surveys. You will need to tweak those results, but in each
case AI has already started the process for you and done a fair amount
of the work.
· AI is a smart repository for organising your thoughts and ideas
- think of your prompts as a stream-of-consciousness conversation with a
colleague who is going to make sense of your ideas and objectives,
Borelli suggested. "I'm just trying to get everything out of my mind and
dump it in there and say 'figure all that out.' And it will."
Source: Northstar Meetings Group