By this point pretty much everyone has heard of Artificial Intelligence or AI. Innovative tools like ChatGPT have now become mainstream parts of everyday life for millions around the globe. One of the biggest questions we hear is how can AI tools help event managers and what is the best way to get started if you are not experienced at using AI??

Recently our Chief Innovation Officer (and resident AI nerd) Hayley Contegiacomo delivered an extremely popular presentation at Cvent Connect in San Antonio about how event planners can use AI to make their jobs easier. As this topic proved so popular, we’re following up with a series of articles breaking down how to use AI for event managers from getting started, to pre, during and post event strategies. In this article, we are going to focus on some easy steps event professionals who have little or no AI experience can take to dip your toe in the water of AI and start to get comfortable with it.

Step 1: Select a chatbot

The marketplace is crowded with chatbots and tools to choose from, from event ai tools integrated with existing event technology, to standalone products for more general use. All this can make the first step a little daunting, so Hayley suggests starting by simply getting comfortable with using an AI assistant. Simply pick one that looks promising and just start using it. If it turns out to be unsuitable, you can always change later, but getting experience and familiarity with this type of tool is the most important part of beginning the process. Some of our favourites at the moment are: Claude , ChatGPT, MetaAI and Genie

Step 2: Leave it open while you work

The next step in getting started is to keep that chatbot open. Leave it in the background or in another tab as you work on other things. Anytime you need an answer to a question, or before you begin a task that feels like it might be time consuming, click into your AI assistant and ask it for help. Haylys’ advice is to “think of the things that are pain points in your job. The things that you’re not good at or take up a lot of your time, and start there!” This practice will help you find out more about what it can do, as well as what kind of pain points it is best at helping you with.

Step 3: Experiment with what prompts will get you the best response

So what prompts should you use to get started? Here are some of our current favourites:

• What are some main tasks I should have on an international corporate conference project plan? (This is a great example of how AI can help you build out a tasklist and streamline your forward planning pre-event). 
• Write an email campaign for a ‘save the date’ for a corporate event. (Chatbots like Claude can generate marketing content like this quickly and efficiently, freeing up time and resources).

• Provide unique swag ideas for a corporate office opening for a technology consulting company in Seattle. (AI can generate specific and differentiated ideas that might be particularly time-consuming to research and create manually. This way, you can save time by simply verifying the AI research rather than doing it all yourself).
• What restaurants are within a 15-minute walk from the Four Seasons Atlanta? (We use prompts like this to help quickly bulk-out a short-list, in this case for dining options near the event hotel).

Step 4: Interpret the result

It’s also important to learn how to interpret what you get back. This is an evolving technology, and not every response will be 100% accurate. Chatbots and other AI tools can sometimes return erroneous information, or misunderstand or misinterpret facts. Learning how and what to fact check, proof-read and edit is a crucial step in deploying these tools to your workflow efficiently. 

Watch this space for our next article breaking down how to use AI in the pre-event phase! And you want to know more about how AI tools can help plan your events, contact an expert at Huddle today.