Embracing AI in the Event Industry: 4 Steps to Get Started

ChatGPT, Midjourney, OpenAI, DALL-E, Bard - these names are becoming more ubiquitous by the second, and are all groundbreaking AI technologies that are reshaping our world. You can hardly go a day without hearing about all the ways AI is revolutionizing industries and changing our world, and for better or for worse, Artificial Intelligence in all of its many forms is here to stay.

Event professionals know how important it is to embrace new possibilities and stay at the cutting edge of innovation. This industry constantly changes and adapts based on trends, social progress, global happenings, and so much more. PartySlate is here to help you approach AI with a sense of curiosity and use it to create ease and efficiency in your business that will set you up for further success. Doing that will help make sure that AI is an enhancer to so many of the things your business is likely already doing.

photos posted by: The Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science | photographer: leila brewster photography

At PartySlate, for example, we use machine learning in many different ways throughout our business. We use it in small, manual ways like checking the accuracy of our writing, to more automated and integrated ways like using AI to identify objects in photos. When you use our platform to search for “Barbie themed baby shower” photos, the results you get are all thanks to AI looking at these photos and tagging them for us.

There are so many ways that you can begin to use AI in your events business, and today we will dive into four simple ways your can use AI to streamline, scale and create efficiencies in your business today. Join us for Digital Day to learn more about Using Artificial Intelligence to Grow your Events Business.

1. Lean on ChatGPT as a virtual writing assistant:

Generating high-quality content just got a lot less time consuming. We recommend using resources like ChatGPT as a complement to your current content creation strategy. Event industry professionals create a lot of text based content every single day. From writing emails to making social media posts to crafting website language, AI can be a boon to this time spent. Ask it to check your writing for clarity and grammatical correctness, expand on your ideas in specific ways, or bring in outside illustrations to help you tell a more compelling story. Integrating ChatGPT into your daily business operations not only saves time but also enables creativity. By using AI to brainstorm fresh ideas for event themes, marketing campaigns, or social media posts, event professionals can unlock new dimensions of innovation and stand out in the competitive landscape.

Here are some important tips to remember when using ChatGPT:

2. Use generative AI for creative visualizations:

Annie Lee, principal planner of Daughter of Design, founder of Plannie, and author of Learn to Speak Wedding: Flashcards for Beginners, says that “moodboards will be a thing of the past” thanks to generative visualization tools like DALL-E and Midjourney. These tools will help event businesses show clients what is possible without having to be an illustrator or spend hours pulling together imagery from the internet. These tools can also give you an opportunity to encourage clients to actively participate in the visualization process, fostering deeper engagement and client connection.

3. Streamline your administrative processes with AI:

Event professionals wear a lot of different hats. Artificial intelligence can help lessen the lift of your administrative processes, making sure that these areas of your business take less time and energy than they used to. AI can do things like help you compose a difficult email to a potential client with programs like ChatGPT Writer, summarizing meeting notes so that you can be in the moment when you’re interfacing with prospects, and even editing photos and videos for your brand. Eventually you could consider more in depth options like implementing a chat-bot to give your potential clients the feeling of having an “always on” customer service team at their disposal.

The options are endless, and you certainly don’t have to do them all (or all at once). By delegating repetitive tasks to AI, event professionals can allocate more time and energy to build stronger client relationships, innovate new services, and invest in professional development.

Tip: Make a list of the things you do in your business daily. Start by integrating AI in a way that makes 2-3 of those things easier and less time consuming.

4. Bolster your learning and development with AI:

Writing the prompt “help me to understand how to pack for an August trip to Paris” into ChatGPT gave me a summarized output of learning that would have taken me at least 20 minutes to google and summarize myself. You can apply this to almost any area that you’re interested in learning about, whether for business or personal. You can also input articles into ChatGPT and ask it to give you key takeaways - just another way that AI is currently making life more efficient.

If you’re not sure where or how to start integrating Artificial Intelligence into your business, it’s ok to play around until you get a better sense of its capabilities. You don’t have to start with something as high stakes as client facing initiatives. In fact, one way we recommend getting started is by trying AI for personal things like creating a recipe from items you have on hand in your pantry. Trying these small, non-work activities will help you to start to understand how to use the tools and help you become more familiar with them. After that, we’ve found that it helps to make a list of 10-15 things you do daily in your business and find applications for AI that will save time in those more rote tasks. 

Want to learn more about using Artificial Intelligence to grow your business? PartySlate’s webinar on Demystifying ChatGPT: Easy Strategies to Grow Your Event Business will allow for a deeper dive into the origins of AI and how quickly it’s gaining traction in even the smallest of our day to day tasks.

As an easy step one, we’ve created a resource to give you 15 ChatGPT Prompts to Streamline Your Events Business.