AI In Events: An Event Planner’s Guide

The last couple of years have seen the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It’s being widely used across various industries to increase efficiency and productivity. The aim of AI is to replicate human intelligence in machines, which makes it suitable for a huge range of applications such as text creation, image and video editing and information gathering.

Event planning is no different, and the new tools and features have been changing the way that event planners work. A report by Kaltura found that 88% of event and marketing professionals are already using AI to some degree. Given how stressful event planning can be and how much work is required to pull off a successful function, the number of people using AI is only set to rise. In this article, we explore the ways in which AI can make your life easier and how you can incorporate it into your planning process.

How can AI be used in event planning?

Event planning can be extremely stressful. With so many things to organise, endless loose ends to tie up and last-minute changes to accommodate, it’s no wonder it’s considered one of the toughest jobs out there.

That’s not to say it isn’t extremely rewarding, but even planners can always use a little help. This is where AI comes in. It can’t replicate or replace your own experience and skills but it can help with some of the heavy lifting of planning events.

Due to its ability to automate processes that would otherwise be time-consuming or resource-heavy, AI is ideal for use in many event-planning tasks. From ticketing to marketing, AI can free up your time and capacity and make more effective decisions by quickly analysing lots of data.

If you’re part of a small team, this can either allow you to concentrate on other tasks or make improvements you’d otherwise be unable to. AI can be used at every stage of the event-planning process and even during and after the event. Below, we’re taking a look at how AI has impacted event planning and the many ways in which it’s being used.

How to use AI in event planning

AI can help event planners with almost every stage of the planning process, and complete tasks even while the event is running. These can include your initial marketing, ticketing and customer support. This is something that’s generally welcomed in the industry, with the vast majority of event organisers in a recent study feeling ‘very positive’ about adopting AI.

Marketing

Marketing can be one of the most time-consuming and expensive aspects of planning an event. Bizzabo found that event organisers spend the largest part of their budget on marketing. There are now a variety of AI tools that can help event planners enhance their marketing by automating processes, freeing up time, and instantly generating content.

Many of the recent advances have been related to language models that can produce relatively sophisticated text quickly. You can use this for website copy, advertising campaigns and social media posts – particularly useful if you’re low on capacity or are working to a deadline.

You can also use artificial intelligence to create images. While we wouldn’t recommend you deceive users with AI pictures that overpromise on what you’re able to deliver, it can help create content quickly in a cost-effective way, and include assets you may otherwise not have had the budget for.

Ultimately, how much you depend on AI for your marketing depends on how much control you want over your output and the amount of time and resources you have at your disposal. If you rely on it too heavily, you can run the risk of making your communications seem too generic without the unique identity of your event. Make sure to experiment and see where you want to set that balance.

Ticketing

Artificial intelligence can help with ticket sales. Platforms like ticketsell use AI to make instant decisions that help you achieve maximum capacity at your event and make it as profitable as possible. They work by assessing your event from the planning stage – have similar events in similar locations worked well in the past? – and then set targets that will be used to measure progress.

Dynamic pricing adjusts ticket pricing based on the progress of your ticket sales. If you’re not hitting targets, platforms can lower prices within set limits, run a promotion or suggest cancelling your event. This will ensure you’re maximising capacity, as well as making your event as profitable as possible. Because AI can constantly analyse data and make changes accordingly, doing this manually would take a huge amount of time and effort that most event planners do not have.

AI can also help you maximise profits by recognising patterns and upselling merchandise and other attendance packages based on user behaviour. The software can identify which combination of additional products is most likely to be of interest to a particular customer, increasing the likelihood of sales and increased profit without the need for a hard sell.

Choosing your venue

Venue selection is another area where AI can save large amounts of time. MemberWise found that finding a venue for a typical event can take up to 44.5 hours, showing that choosing a suitable venue, particularly if you have specific requirements, can take a huge amount of research and effort.

Machine learning can help you find the right venue based on size, location and event type – as well as other requirements – without needing to spend time individually comparing each one.

Venues can sign up and indicate their suitability for a particular event. For example, it can find a conference venue or the ideal place for a book launch and provide all the practical details like capacity and location. Platforms can match your proposed event with the perfect location. While this is useful in and of itself, AI can also help to make predictions on turnout at different venues and locations, so you will be able to predict capacity.

Relying too heavily on these tools and taking them purely at face value isn’t without risk. The thorough research that usually goes into selecting a venue helps weed out potentially unsuitable venues based on details that may not be available through this matchmaking service.

For a tried-and-tested central London venue that’s perfect for everything from meetings and conferences to comedy events and book launches, you can skip the comparisons and go straight to 20 Bedford Way. Our versatile space is suitable for a wide range of events and we’ll be there to support you at every stage of your event.

Chatbots

AI chatbots can transmit lots of information about your event to attendees. You can use them before and during the event, freeing up time for you and your team that would otherwise be spent answering these questions. They can be used to:

Provide event information: This is a key one. As much information as you can include on your website, some customers either can’t find what they’re looking for or don’t take the time to browse your site. Having chatbots available on the site makes finding information simple and straightforward, and its availability will mean that people who may have sent an email or called directly will receive the information they need quickly, and be more likely to attend.
Answer ticketing queries: As we’ve explored above, AI can be extremely useful for ticketing. But, as well as maximising ticket sales, chatbots can instantly answer ticketing queries so there are no significant interruptions to their buying journey. Having this availability of information at this stage will not only ensure more satisfied attendees but there will also be fewer people who abandon their purchase due to not being able to find the information they’re searching for.
Directions and travel instructions: Even if you have thorough instructions available, come event day, you’ll undoubtedly be inundated by questions and queries about how to get there. Chatbots allow you to relay access information and solve most problems.
Information about sessions or aspects of the event: You can use chatbots while the event is running to answer questions about individual sessions or aspects of the event. This could be about what these include, times and durations, where to find certain facilities, or when and where food or drink is available. Again, this can free up hours of accumulated time for you or your team on event day.

However, you don’t want to be entirely reliant on chatbots for your communication. They work well at conveying simple information, but if your customers can’t get through to a real person and find the details they’re looking for, they may become frustrated. A study by PwC found that 75% of people will want to interact with a real person more as technology improves. So, while chatbots can be a useful tool to help divert common queries, you shouldn’t be over-reliant on them.

Networking

Matchmaking algorithms can take some of the guesswork out of networking. AI can assess the profiles of attendees, analyse the information and predict who will be a good match. This can be used for seating plans at dinners, meetings and events to seat like-minded people close to each other and facilitate connections. For professional events, networking is often a high priority for attendees and leveraging AI helps to maximise the chances of meaningful meetings.

Automate feedback

Feedback is invaluable for event planners. It helps to identify successes and trends and find improvements to make next time. AI helps to automate this process. It can automatically send out feedback forms, collect data from chatbots and sign-up forms, and then quickly analyse this data to pull out key information that will help your next event be even better.

Harnessing data and identifying trends

As we touched on above, automating feedback means you’ll have access to large amounts of data without the need to collect it all manually. It’s worth digging into this to find key themes and trends.

For example, did you have several queries directed to the chatbot asking if parking is available at the venue? That’s an indication that this information wasn’t easy to find. Equally, if there were a large number of requests that you couldn’t fulfil, e.g. ‘Can I bring my dog?’, this is a clue that your audience would appreciate a pet-friendly venue.

Reduce stress

With event planning regularly appearing near the top of the list for ‘most stressful job’, anything that can be done to reduce the pressure on you is a plus. As we’ve seen, AI can free up huge amounts of time, allowing you to get on with time-consuming jobs without constantly fielding queries. This will help you maximise your time when you’re overstretched, helping you to cope with event planning stress.

Event planning AI tools

AI can do a lot to make event planning easier, but it does require some initial research to ensure you find the right tool. To help you get started, we’ve listed a few below.

AI event planning tools can be broken down into the following categories:

- Marketing – there are lots of AI tools available that can help with your event marketing. For text, ChatGPT is the most popular tool out there. It doesn’t always produce the perfect, polished copy, but it can be a valuable starting point and is great for ideation.
- Image creation – as well as producing text, AI tools like DALL·E 2 can produce images from simple prompts as a quick and cost-effective way to add visual assets to your campaign.
- Analytics – AI’s ability to quickly analyse lots of data is especially useful for analytics as it can quickly identify trends and patterns from your data. Tableau is a useful tool that helps you visualise data in a way that’s easy to understand, so you can make informed decisions.
- Networking – let AI connect the right people at your event with Grip. This tool provides matches between participants based on their interests and profiles and helps you to maintain and track these relationships over multiple events.
- Chatbots – using an AI chatbot can free up your capacity. Capacity allows you to automate replies to many straightforward queries, meaning you’ll spend less time replying to messages.

20 Bedford Way – the ideal Central London events venue

After you’ve let AI take some of the hard work out of planning the event, choose 20 Bedford Way to take the stress out of running your event with the knowledge that we’ll work to help ensure it’s a success. We’re conveniently located in Central London and we have the expertise and facilities needed to ensure your event runs seamlessly. Get in touch by giving us a call on 020 7612 6143 or by filling out an enquiry form.

AI in events: a guide for event planners