Prevue met up with Amy Kramer, Innovation Leader at Maritz, to learn how her company is using AI to optimize event planning internally and for its clients.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been making steady inroads in the meetings and events planning processes over the past year or so, going from cool fad to useful tool in record time.
To learn more, Prevue met up with Amy Kramer, Innovation Leader at event management firm Maritz, during IMEX America in Las Vegas to learn how her company is using AI to optimize event planning internally and for its clients. Here’s some AI-related intelligence she shared that you can use now for your own work.
Prevue: How are you using AI to do the job of meeting and event planning more quickly, effectively and perhaps even more creatively?
Kramer: We have been exploring both how planners can use AI every day, and then also specific use cases. Some of the big wins we’ve seen early on for every-day is using it for content creation, such as helping planners come up with new program themes. Instead of researching on the internet, they can prompt an AI tool to give them different ideas to serve as a starting point. One of the values and benefits of AI is that you then can continue to prompt on that same question to get more granular and specific results.
Another area where AI is proving useful is to help planners better coordinate with other team members. Planners are typically verry creative and collaborative, and their biggest ally is their peers. In the old world, coordinating with peers involved knowing who’s doing a specific trip and who their go-to resources are. That can sometimes take up to 10 days just to find the right information. With AI, you can plug into a knowledge database and ask, for example, tell me about the most recent trips we’ve planned in Barcelona and who were the people responsible for that trip? And can you give me their proposals? In minutes you’ll have those five people and their proposals, which you can quickly use to follow up with them.
Event management collaboration is one of the specific use cases we’re most interested in. Being able to create a knowledge base that can be connected across all our members allows them to better search, collaborate, inform, create content and learn from each other. We’re now in the process of running a number of different pilots within our own organization.
Prevue: How can planners use AI to personalize their offerings?
Kramer: There are a lot of tasks where planners have to shape the same content for different personas or different types of stakeholders. With AI, they can write one prompt and say, “I need to create a session description to attract creatives, to attract leadership, to attract X, Y and Z.” Ai can help you create those descriptions for these unique audiences in less than 10 seconds, instead of spending an hour or two trying to write those descriptions in the right voices.
Prevue: Any other basic, essential planning tasks AI can help with?
Kramer: Summarization is huge. We see event planners using AI tools to help them take all of the output from an event and provide a summary of the event, instead of having to take 100 pages of responses of surveys and verbatims and do the post-con report manually.
AI can summarize the biggest insights, as well as what needs to be improved and what went really, really well. Of course, you do have to check the work, but it can save so much time to use AI to analyze all that data.
Prevue: What about potential security concerns?
Kramer: I would never recommend using the free version of public tools such as ChatGPT because the data is not protected. I love Spark [an AI tool developed specifically by and for meeting professionals available from the Professional Convention Management Association and Gevme]. However, the challenge with Spark for some large corporations, including ours, is that some of their privacy and security may not be in alignment with our corporate compliance, security and legal requirements.
We recommend starting by talking with your technology, legal, privacy and security teams to determine what tools can be approved in a safe and secure way.
We are currently using Microsoft Copilot because we are connected into the Microsoft suite. So when we authenticate with our information, then we can use it in a safe and secure way. We would never put any client-specific information into ChatGPT or another free tool, and if you’re trying to use that for your day-to-day work, you’re very limited on how you can use one of the free tools because you can’t put all the information into it that you need.
Our best recommendation for using these tools is to not put anything into AI that you wouldn’t want to see said about your company online. You wouldn’t give away your secret sauce on Facebook or give away your corporate IP on LinkedIn — use that same structure using ChapGPT.
Prevue: What are some of the other specific AI use cases you’ve been exploring?
Kramer: We’re making progress on a use case around the hotel invoicing and reconciliation process. That typically can take about 60 days to record, process and then reconcile, especially when you have people staying at multiple properties with different invoices that may contain different information and formatting. We’re testing a document ingestion process where you can load those 800 pages into AI, which can locate keywords and key areas even though the formatting may be different. It does still require a human to review it all and make sure it’s accurate — what we call keeping a human in the loop.
Instead of 60 days, it can run that in days, maybe even hours, and then give you areas you may need to research and refine. In our initial pilots, we’ve been able to reduce those 60 days to 10. This makes the hotel happier because they’re getting paid quicker. Clients can reconcile bills and move on faster. Our clients are all raising their hands asking if they can use this. We’re still ironing out some kinks, but we’re hoping to finish testing it in the next few months, then really scale it.
Another key use case involves resource management. The idea is not to reduce resources, but to better manage them.
We have a lot of different departments within our organization: our guest services team, our on-site team, our travel directors, our meeting event managers. They are all assigned to specific events based on a calendar of availability (excepting those who are dedicated). Early in our contracting process, clients often will say, “How many travel directors am I going to need? How many on site staff, etc.,” and we have to estimate that.
Now we’re partnering with our data science team in a separate business unit to build a predictive model that can look at past events and then estimate in advance, using AI, what we need for these specific events.
That helps us reduce the amount of overtime when we have to add people at the last minute. Using the AI-based predictive model, we can reduce burn-out and the cost for onboarding, and we can be more effective in the amount of labor that we put towards that project. This is still in progress, but so far, our prototypes and our pilots are showing that we can crack this in a really interesting way.
Prevue: Any new projects or use cases you’re working on now?
Kramer: Originally, we were looking at how to use AI to help our internal processes. Now we are shifting more to the client-facing side. Our next exploration area will be use cases that are focused specifically on our clients.
We’re also setting up meetings with our partners and suppliers to understand where they are in their AI journey. Because we also need to leverage how we’re using AI with our partners — what we don’t want to do is create something that we don’t need to because we can get it from our partner. For example, we work with Cvent a lot. We don’t need to create an AI widget that’s going to help us with certain things relative to how we work with Cvent if Cvent is ultimately going to unveil a tool that we’re going to naturally get anyway. We also want to explore what we’re doing that our partners can also take advantage of.
It’s so important that we share with each other. It’s not about trying to be the first to the market with something, it’s about sharing along the way.
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