AI: it feels like everyone's talking about it. It has the power to make running events faster, smarter, and a lot less stressful—but let’s be honest, it can be hard to keep up. New tools are launching all the time, and figuring out what’s actually useful as opposed to just hype can feel like a full-time job in itself.
To help you navigate the world of AI in events, we've put together a list of practical ways to use AI tools to save time, be more efficient, and deliver better experiences.
Why should I use AI?
If you're not already experimenting with AI, you should. Using AI, you can delegate tasks like drafting content, building slides, or analyzing data, making you much more efficient and effective.
Think of AI as your personal technology assistant. In the blink of an eye, you now have an assistant that never tires, can work all day or night, and doesn't need coffee or conversation. All it needs are the right prompts.
It handles the tedious, time-consuming tasks so you can focus on what really matters: creative thinking, strategy, and decision-making.
💡Short on time? Check out some AI tools that can help you:
Practical ways to use AI in your events
1. Pre-event planning and logistics
Sourcing venues and suppliers
Choosing the right venue and vendors can be a drain on your time. There are so many companies to compare, and you'll likely waste hours trawling through websites to find what you need. AI can cut through the noise.
Cvent Vendor Marketplace's AI matching technology pairs you with the best-fit vendors based on geography, group size, event dates, target audience, and other user preferences.
The Cvent Supplier Networkoffers an AI-powered search that helps you find the right event venues faster.
Smart scheduling assistants
Coordinating calendars can quickly become a headache, especially when you’re managing multiple teams and meetings. AI Tools can help you coordinate multiple calendars for pre-event meetings or internal prep.
- Clockwise is an AI-powered time management tool primarily designed to optimize scheduling for large teams and individuals who need to attend a lot of meetings.
- Reclaim is a scheduling tool that helps users organize their calendars and prioritize tasks. It can connect with Google Calendar, analyze meeting times, and suggest beneficial scheduling options.
2. Creating event content
When you’re under pressure, creativity can be the first thing to suffer. With multiple tasks competing for your attention, it's hard to find the right inspiration for marketing tasks like crafting emails, social media copy, or landing pages.
Whether generating email and social media content or developing an agenda for your attendees, AI can help you speed up the process of moving from a blank page to a first draft. And tools like Cvent's AI Writing Assistantcan give you a jumpstart, whether you need fresh copy or a new angle.
💡Take a look at Cvent’s AI Writing Assistant in action:
If you need to create presentations for your events, tools like Beautiful.ai turn your prompts into slide decks complete with visuals.
While Cvent's Video tools can help you automatically create descriptions, add subtitles or captions, and create chapters for video content.
💡Pro tip: Use AI to help get your creative juices flowing, but you’ll need to add your personal touch to make it obvious that the final content comes from a human.
3. Personalization and engagement
Attendees' expectations are constantly evolving. AI can help you meet these expectations and drive more personalized experiences.
A key step in delivering personalized experiencesis capturing the right data. You’re already collecting valuable data during registration. AI helps you turn that data into action and can help you:
- Analyze attendee data that you capture
- Recommend relevant sessions
- Match attendees with similar interests
- Craft targeted comms, pre, during and post-event
AI-powered chatbots
Answering the same questions repeatedly becomes dull very quickly.
Unfortunately, it's hard to avoid. Every year, you can count on getting the same kind of questions about your event from delegates, speakers, and stakeholders alike.
“What time is the event?” ” Where’s it taking place?” “ What time are the sessions?” The list seems endless, but you can use chatbots to do the heavy lifting. Chatbots never get less enthusiastic, even after they've been asked the same question 120 times in a row.
AI-powered chatbots are already in common use on event websites, social media channels, and messaging apps, for all kinds of attendee queries. They can be a valuable tool since they’re available 24/7, can give directions, and answer FAQs. Chatbots can also:
- Guide attendees through the registration process
- Surface agenda highlights
- Assist in real time during the event
- Gather feedback
- Reduce strain on your team
- Support accessibility and inclusion
Improve networking with AI-driven matchmaking
Networking can make or break the event experience. But it’s not always easy to get it right.
Finding the right people at networking events is often daunting for attendees. You can help them by getting AI to analyze profiles and interests in advance and offer a customized list for each attendee, all from an event app.
4. Real-time translation and captioning
The benefits of AI translation include cost saving, ease of setup, and on-demand access without the need for human interpreters or special equipment.
- InterprefyAI delivers speech translation and live captioning solutions for events, webinars, and global businesses.
- Wordly.ai - Attendees can access Wordly from their personal device and listen or read in their preferred language, from anywhere in the world.
5. Post-event and analytics
Evaluating events can be hard work. Unless you’re fond of numbers and analysing data, evaluation will be a task that you may decide to put off for as long as possible.
AI tools can help you analyze and evaluate the impact of your events.
AI excels at processing large volumes of data. It can even help you draw insights you may not have spotted, enabling you to make recommendations for your event's evolution.
Just be sure to choose trusted tools, as some AI platforms may store or share data. Always review privacy policies and avoid uploading sensitive information.
Sentiment analysis
Want to know how attendees really felt about your event? AI sentiment analysis models use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to identify positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Here are the tools that can help:
AI considerations to be mindful of
Whilst AI can boost your efficiency, the speed at which AI is evolving means that there are several things to keep in mind. Let’s take a look at some of the risks.
Data privacy
Data privacy is a concern, particularly when it comes to adhering to data privacy regulations like GDPR.
Some open AI tools may store data you share. If that includes sensitive attendee information, you could unintentionally create a compliance risk. Always check the privacy policy of any AI tool and avoid sharing personal information.
Biases
AI can only draw from the information already available. It can't necessarily distinguish between correct and fake information, nor can it influence any biases in the collected data.
Therefore, if survey programmes have been created with (inadvertent) in-built bias, the results of any AI data analysis will contain the same in-built bias.
Generic content
The biggest issue with AI-generated copy is that it lacks the human touch. It can emulate emotional content, but it never truly feels right. The result is mediocre content that feels generic.
If you decide to use AI for content creation, you need to add your branding and style to the messages and communications it generates, to ensure they resonate with your audience.
Someone needs to be responsible for checking and editing the copy that is generated by AI. Otherwise, you put the quality of your content at risk.
Hallucinations
Don’t rely on AI to get everything right. AI tools have been known to invent "facts" (this is referred to as hallucination) so always make sure you have your AI cite sources for the facts and figures it supplies and check them yourself before using them.
Use AI to stay ahead (strategically)
AI isn't new, but to get the most out of it, you need more than just tools: you need curiosity and a willingness to test, learn, and adapt. Start now, or you may risk falling behind the teams who’ve made AI part of their everyday workflow.
Want a deeper dive? Download our guide, Mastering AI for Events.
