Today Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting our lives and going forward, it will become an eminent feature of every system.
Relying on computation for decision-making gives businesses a greater competitive edge. And, we have people talking about AI everywhere, from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg.
Event management is no exception and an AI experience will be expected by many. Following are the areas where Artificial Intelligence will play a major role in Event Management –
Personalized experience: A very important use of AI in Event management is personalization. In today’s world of technological-detachment, personalization adds empathy to the user’s experience.
For example, you are attending an entrepreneurs’ meetup. After a long session you want to network with other like-minded people.
Immediately, a notification pops up,
“Hi Mike, we’ve found 2 matches like you, Brian & James.
They are running startups and passionate about A.I.
Would you like to invite for them for a quick chat?
BTW, the XYZ coffee-booth serves a delicious coffee and have a 10% discount ONLY for you! Tap here to invite”
How will you feel?
Awesome!
In short, AI can be a match matching engine among exhibitors, attendees and organizers.
According to a series of studies, 48% of consumers buy more when marketers cater to their personalized experience & the marketing ROI is 5x-8x. AI techniques equipped with context, content and behavioral data has made personalization an important and competitive feature for any brand.
Shorter check in lines & Security: Nobody likes long queues and today’s manual attendee verification is tedious. AI can help in reducing the check-in time by using face recognition techniques, comparing the actual face with the photographs submitted during the signup process.
It can also be used to identify potential security threats in a crowd of attendees with strategically placed cameras and drones.
For example , the Chinese police caught 25 criminals at a beer festival using the face recognition technique.
Better customer service: Good customer service is a key pillar for any successful business.
According to Zendesk research following are some insights-
- 62% of B2B and 42% of B2C customers repeated purchase after a good customer service experience
- 66% of B2B and 52% of B2C customers stopped further purchase after a bad customer service interaction.
- 69% attributed their good customer service experience to quick resolution of their problem
IBM states that 85% of all customer interactions will be handled by AI powered bots by 2020.
AI powered ChatBots for events (EventBots) can help the attendees get information about the event over text, anytime, anywhere. They can also cater to attendee queries and expect immediate responses.
For example:
What’s the Wi-Fi password?
Where is the venue?
When is session X starting?
I want to know about the speaker Y!
Please give me an abstract for the session.
The organizer can also request for session feedbacks, poll ratings etc. It can also send event update notifications such as change in a schedule or when the attendee’s favorite speaker is presenting etc.
ChatBots are effective and inexpensive solutions, which are highly available, not constrained by holidays, time zones or attrition. It is exceedingly scalable and makes no differentiation serving 100 or 1000s of customers at the same time. There already exists ChatBots available for use on popular platforms like Facebook messenger, slack etc.
Planning and decision making: AI can help in gathering data across platforms, and assess event popularity, public opinions and work towards providing meaningful insights and suggestions.
For example
AI can aid in choosing panel experts, popular artists or eminent speakers for the event based on their popularity & opinions of the people. Data such as tweets, likes, post, comments etc. can be collected from social networks and then apply Natural Language Processing and AI techniques to generate meaningful insights and suggestions.
Also, the AI engine can predict a venue in the heart of the city, with free Wi-Fi access; well-maintained restrooms and has the best reviews or any other relevant constraints fed into the engine.
In conclusion, event management is a competitive market and organizers must deliver services which are extremely attendee focused. Every customer will expect more intelligent interaction from machines, and for event management, attendee focused AI solutions are a must.
Do you intend to focus on AI for your event management?
