Gevme’s Veemal Gungadin and PCMA’s Sherrif Karamat announced the launch of Project Spark at IMEX Frankfurt 2023.
“You can fear it, you can ignore it, but you cannot run away from
it,” said Sherrif Karamat, CEO of PCMA and CEMA. “We prefer to run
towards it.”
The ‘it’ in question is artificial intelligence, a fast-growing field which has taken the travel and MICE industries by storm since the recent launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot.
“The question is not if we will use AI, but how we will do it, and to
make sure AI works for us, both collectively and individually, in
positive ways” Karamat added. “Properly channelled, AI has the potential
to empower each of us to accelerate innovation and progress for our
audiences, our businesses, and our careers.”
Looking to “demystify” AI and help business event professionals ride
the exponential wave, PCMA and Gevme yesterday at IMEX Frankfurt
announced the launch of Project Spark, a free research and educational
initiative to uncover the impact of generative AI on the business events
industry.
A tool to jump-start routine event planning tasks
“Project Spark is an initiative driven by event professionals for
event professionals,” said Veemal Gungadin, CEO of Gevme. “We have built
on a tool that leverages generative AI to help event professionals
boost their productivity, and in some cases over 70% time saving on
setting tasks.”
Participants in Project Spark’s research phase will experience an
early version of an AI platform under development, where the model will
be tested for various practical applications within the scope of
business events to understand its impact on workforce productivity.
The tool could be utilised by event professionals to jump-start
routine event planning tasks such as generating ideas for events,
setting out the agenda and session descriptions for conferences,
reviewing of contracts, among others. The content could also be adjusted
for tones, depending on the target audience, such as rigid tone for
scientific events, and a causal tone for networking functions. For event
marketers, the tool can also help content repurposing, such as turning
existing videos into blog posts.
M&C Asia, together with sister titles of Northstar Meetings
Group, were given a live demonstration during IMEX on how event
professionals can utilise Project Spark to assist their work.
What differentiates Project Spark from other generative AI tools such
as ChatGPT, according to Gungadin, is that event professionals will be
able to find most of the common use cases across an event life cycle on
one single platform, instead of having to download plugins to support
various functions.
Event professionals who wish to be part of Project Spark are invited to join the community waitlist.