Planning with intelligence: Your checklist for creating events with AI

Brooke Gracey [00:00:00]:

There's probably somebody out there using bing right now, though. That's the thing, right? Like, and exactly what Hailey is saying. Yeah, when you get used to it and you're, like, comfortable in your space, like, why change anything? Like, hello, email addresses out there, like, let's do it.

Alyssa Peltier [00:00:17]:

Great Events create great brands. But pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences, well, that takes a village, and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews [00:00:29]:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu [00:00:30]:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier [00:00:32]:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Felicia Asiedu [00:00:42]:

Hi, everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Felicia, and I am your host for today's episode, which I always say this on podcasts, I'm super excited about, but this one is really for me because I love talking about AI, but even more so, I love talking about the things that are really going to help you, tools you can use, tips and tricks. So, let's get going with this conversation. I wouldn't be a great host if I didn't have some wonderful guests to join me. And one of our first guests, you might remember, because she started the podcast and she used to be one of the podcast hosts. So, Brooke, welcome.

Brooke Gracey [00:01:16]:

Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited to be back on the podcast. This is so awesome. And for such an amazing topic. For those of you who don't know, my name is Brooke Gracey. I am the director of demand generation here at Cvent. I've been here for almost 13 years now. So really excited to talk about AI and all the fun ways we've been using it here at events.

Felicia Asiedu [00:01:38]:

Awesome. Thanks, Brooke. And I know you just did a fantastic session at Cvent CONNECT. Where were you again? You were in Sony.

Brooke Gracey [00:01:46]:

Yee ha. Yeah.

Felicia Asiedu [00:01:49]:

And you were joined by the wonderful Hayley, is that correct?

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:01:53]:

Yes. Yeah, we had a great session. Loved our time in San Antonio. Besides the heat. Nice and hot.

Felicia Asiedu [00:02:00]:

Hayley, tell us, who are you? Welcome to the podcast. What do you do?

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:02:03]:

Nice to be here, Felicia. I'm the rookie of the group. Very excited to join. Love the topic. As Brooke said, we kind of geeked out on it for a while. My name is Hayley Contegiacomo. I am the Chief Innovation Officer at Huddle Agency. So we're a third party agency that specializes in in all things tech.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:02:21]:

Like, we use the best of the tech to give us time to focus on planning the event. I've come from planning backgrounds and my background is a planner, and then I kind of slowly move through the technology world, business improvement processes, and now really focusing on AI and how to use it for events.

Felicia Asiedu [00:02:38]:

Phenomenal. I love that because that really puts you in the shoes of the people that we're talking to. And you can understand pain points and things that they will be experiencing. Experiencing as they plan.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:02:47]:

Yeah, they've been my pain points, so I totally understand it.

Felicia Asiedu [00:02:51]:

Couldn't agree with you more. I think at Cvent they give us these multifaceted roles where you kind of like, you're going to do this, but you also plan events. And you're going to do this, but you also plan events. So, let's get straight into it. I know, like, if we go to loads of AI sessions like I do, I'm very interested in AI, and you'll often get the what is AI? You know, what should we be kind of thinking about? And I think what I really want to take us into is an immediate not what is it? Because I think we know that by now, but what are some of the pain points that we are experiencing, just like we said, and how can AI help us to overcome those? So, let's go through this as a bit of a journey. We're going to do like a pre-event, during-event, post-event journey, just like you kind of did in San Antonio, but with a bit of a twist. So, Brooke, I'm going to come to you tell us that first pain point that you might experience as you are thinking about that pre-event stage.

Brooke Gracey [00:03:45]:

So when I think about pre-event, I really think of it as almost like this brainstorming phase, right? We have to kind of like gather all the data that we've gotten from all our other events. We have to come up with the big ideas about what this next event is going to be, and then we also have to socialize it, right, to all of our many, many, many stakeholders, people who are going to generate the content, who are going to give us the budget, et cetera, et cetera. So when I think about using AI pre-event, I think about it in terms of helping us do those tasks, not necessarily that it's going to like, do it for us, but it's going to be really helpful, like almost like our assistant, to help us do those tasks better. So, you know, generating ideas based on past event data, what were those attendee preferences and how should that inform what our next event is going to look like? Finding the venue that we're going to go to, right, like that is sometimes the hardest thing to do. And especially here at Cvent, we're so focused on that CSN search, we even have something in beta right now. It's an AI powered search where you can really deep dive into very specific criteria of what you're looking for to help you find the venue. But even, like, all those meetings, like, how many meetings does it take to actually get to an event plan? Probably hundreds, honestly. And just using AI to help us automate those meetings, taking notes for us, giving super detailed action items, all of this stuff is just so helpful when we think about those pain points pre-event.

Felicia Asiedu [00:05:12]:

Awesome. That's such a good overview. And I think, you know, I can relate to all those things you just said. And I think the planners out there have heard this a little bit. Like, they're kind of like, yeah, I think. I think I've heard of maybe one or two of the things you just said. But what might be missing for them is, okay, so you've told me I need to use AI to take notes. What does that mean? What type AI?

Brooke Gracey [00:05:32]:

I saw the dream, right? I'm like, these are the dream scenario. But then I'm like, so lucky because Hayley can jump in and say, this is exactly the tools I used. So, yeah, my area.

Felicia Asiedu [00:05:44]:

Brilliant. Hayley, take it away. Give us some tools.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:05:47]:

All sounds so familiar. Like Brooke said, like, the biggest, I think Pro to AI is cutting down the time it takes to do certain things. Like, for me, I know meetings. Oh, my God. I am in back-to-back meetings all day. And then you get to the end of the day, and you're like, what did I even talk about in that meeting? Like, I have no idea what I spoke about. What was I meant to do? I've got some hand scribbles that I wrote down, but I was too busy focusing on listening that I didn't actually take notes. So little things like, there's plenty of AI tools now out there that joins your meetings.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:06:20]:

One that I use is called read AI. It's an invitee to all of your meetings. You can choose whether you invited it or not. But any meeting that attends with you, it takes notes. It records the session. It documents tasks and action items. So it will say, Brooke said she'll follow up with a venue. So it has a little action item for Brooke, follow up with venue.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:06:42]:

But the thing that I also love about it is it summarizes all of your categories. You might have started talking about budget, and it would do a little summary. You might have started talking about venue selection. It would do a little category. So you can really read these kind of synopsis of all of your meetings. So for me, I get to the stage where I'm kind of nearing the end of an event planning process, and I just read all of those highlights, all of the meetings that I took during the planning process just to make sure I didn't miss anything. So there's plenty read AI I use. There's some, I know there's otter out at the moment that's becoming pretty popular, I think.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:07:20]:

So that's another one. But for me as well. What's other things that are going to get me organized? So Brooke and I spoke about this a ton, but you can't get past a chatbot, it's your colleague. You have it open all day, you ask it questions. I just sit there and I'm like, okay, I don't even know how to start a speaker briefing document. I don't have a template on it. So I'll just ask the chatbot, create a document for me formatted nicely that I can send to a, whatever you want to send it to, and here's things that you need to include, and it will come up with a whole document. So it's probably not going to be perfect, but it's going to get you past that initial freeze where you just don't know where to start.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:08:08]:

So, for me, I've tried so many out there, I think I started with chat GPT, you know, way back in the day. My preference these days is one that's called Claude. I just find that the results are kind of what I'm looking for. I find that it's relatively accurate. So even when you find a product that you think, yes, this will solve my need. Then look for other products that are the same, test them all and you'll really start to feel comfortable with one over the others. I think I said it in cvance session, but I always relate it to Chrome versus Explorer. Like, you feel comfortable in a browser, others like when you go to it, it kind of feels a little like you're discovering something new again.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:08:51]:

So test, you know, three or four chat bots, find the one that you like, and then you kind of get the results that you start looking for.

Felicia Asiedu [00:08:58]:

Sorry, when you said that, I was thinking about Yahoo search.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:09:02]:

Oh, yeah, bing.

Felicia Asiedu [00:09:05]:

You know, sorry, a sign of my age.

Brooke Gracey [00:09:10]:

But yeah, there's probably somebody out there using bing right now, though. That's the thing, right? I, and exactly what Hayley is saying. Yeah, when you get used to it and you're like comfortable in your space. Like, why change anything? Like, hello, email addresses out there. Like, let's do it.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:09:27]:

If it works for you, go for it. There's plenty of options that you're going to find one that works for you. Even if you're a bing user?

Felicia Asiedu [00:09:37]:

Yeah, even if you're a Bing user, you're okay. No, but I love hearing that because some people get stuck a little bit, I think, in, in the traditional sort of chat GPT. And I like that you've given, you know, something. Go and find another chatbot that might suit you. But can I ask, have either of you ever used, and I know we're still in the pre-phase, we will move into the during phase in a sec. But have either of you ever used more project planning tools? Because I know that as planners, thinking about, you know, Trello boards and thinking about, you know, is it Monday.com or things like that, there is automation now written into these. Have either of you experimented with, with the automation in the planning sort of boards?

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:10:18]:

Yeah, we use Asana that has the AI automation built in, which I know Brooke talks about this a lot, so I'm not going to steal her thunder, but it's one that we always had. And then all of a sudden it had this AI automation through it. So we were already familiar with the product and then just went that level, level up and started to use how the automation part of it.

Brooke Gracey [00:10:43]:

I love to give mom my soapbox about this because it's like the, like, the tip that I would give anybody thinking about using AI is that you're probably already using a tool that has AI built in. I mean, you're thinking CVN, you're thinking Asana, you're thinking Canva, Adobe Photoshop, right? Like, this is the comfy environment that you already know how to use this tool. So, like, what better way to start dipping your toes into AI through these comfortable tools you're already using? So, I also am a huge fan of Asana. And yeah, it's like we've been using it for years. Like, why not use these really cool AI functionality that they have built right in?

Felicia Asiedu [00:11:22]:

Agreed. And like, one more pre-question, something about graphic design. Now I'm thinking about the image generation and things like that. Pre-event, we're thinking about marketing. Like you said, Brooke, you know, you've got to get this thing out there, talk about it. When it comes to graphic design, I have tried to get my dayai game on, and I think I'm Dayai Phelan because like, these people come out looking weird and wild I'm trying to be very specific with my prompts and all of that, but any better, I know mid-journey is like, it's my winner so far, but any tips and tools for image generation?

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:12:01]:

I have to say I did an example on Dayai three. I don't know which one you're using, but the e-three version is definitely easier to use than it's kind of pre-assessors. I did do a demonstration in Cvent CONNECT on that product for a hero image in the site designer. And the same thing with me when I first started using it, I was like, oh, that's not what I was looking for. You've got to find the balance between asking it enough prompts and too many, I guess. And then if you start to have it, phase one, then ask it to tweak things rather than going full in on everything that you need at once. So even with those sorts of examples, it's, you know, finding the product and then finding how to use it. It took me a while to start to really generate some good images, and it does now have prompts where you can start, like, what kind of style of image do you want? So, starting from there rather than starting from scratch.

Felicia Asiedu [00:13:08]:

Yeah. That is hefty. Good advice, I will tell you. I love that. Tweaking, tweaking and tweaking. That's really good. I guess it's like any artist, you know, you start with something, and then you sort of keep shaping it and tweaking it so you still need some creativity. That sounds, like, in there, it's not just about the tech.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:13:25]:

Yes.

Brooke Gracey [00:13:25]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:13:26]:

I feel like half the challenge is finding the product, and then the other half is finding out how to use it.

Felicia Asiedu [00:13:31]:

Mm hmm. Awesome.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:13:33]:

Canva.

Brooke Gracey [00:13:34]:

I know my favorite use.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:13:39]:

Canva. Yeah, it does. The image generation.

Brooke Gracey [00:13:43]:

One of the interesting things, Hayley, I think you said this on stage when we were in San Antonio, but also, like, asking the AI tool to ask you questions, like, what are some questions I could answer for you to help you better do this task I'm asking you to do, which I thought was really interesting because, like, we're constantly sitting there with our prompts trying to guess, like, what's the next thing that's going to make this exactly what I want it to be? But, like, asking the tool itself what would be helpful, I think is really interesting and something we should all be trying.

Felicia Asiedu [00:14:12]:

Very cool. Very cool.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:14:14]:

Ask a chatbot tips on Dali or Dali e three, whichever version you're using, because it's going to then scour its how to guides to find out for you what you're doing wrong on a different AI product.

Felicia Asiedu [00:14:28]:

Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. I love this. I think we've. What I really like about this is we've covered, yes, we're doing pre-event, but we've covered some of the core tips of, like, using what you've already got, challenging chat to challenge itself and to challenge you. I think, like, you can use those tips all the way throughout your event, but let's say. So let's take that and skip into the. During the event. So, Brooke, what are some of those during event pain points that you're thinking, come on, gotta be a tool for this.

Felicia Asiedu [00:14:56]:

You know, AI can solve this. Lay it on us for sure.

Brooke Gracey [00:15:00]:

I mean, and this even happens pre-event, but especially during event, our attendees don't just create, they like, insist on a personalized experience, right. If they're gonna get on a plane and they're gonna be away from their families, and their company is gonna invest money for us, them to go to these events. So, you know, specifically those on site events, they need to be getting the most out of it. And probably two of the biggest pain points they're going to see is, okay, out of the thousand sessions you're offering me, which are the sessions I should be going to, and then I'm sitting in a sea of people, right? I mean, I was in San Antonio, what, there was like four, three, 4000 people there. How am I going to find the people that are actually going to give me what I'm looking for out of this event, right? So using AI to help with the matchmaking, using it to help with recommendations on which sessions I should be going to, you know, who I should be talking to, even what vendors I should be talking to, which, when you think about it from an event planning perspective, that's huge for you. You know, getting the ROI, your vendors, getting the ROI out of your event means they're coming back next year. So if you can use a technology to help them get, like, really, really good traffic, then that's the way to do it. And those are maybe some bigger ideas.

Brooke Gracey [00:16:11]:

Think about just the small stuff, too. I love going to the help desk at Cvent Connect, and I just like chit-chatting with the people there. And I ask them, how's it going? And they're telling me they're getting the same three or four questions every single time, right, which I think is pretty common, but we can use on-site chat bots. Maybe it's a cool robot-looking thing that they can interact with, or maybe it's just within the app or, you know, the event website where they can. They can go get answers to the most common of questions, which is also going to help you reduce staffing, which reduces cost, which is like the best of the best, right?

Felicia Asiedu [00:16:50]:

Absolutely. So, Hayley, I'm coming to you. Loads of pain points out there.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:16:55]:

I'm going to go back to Brooke's point of using technology that you already have. Sievent. It's great for some of those things, especially with kind of like suggesting different sessions and who to talk to. So you cannot go past that, of course. And then there's one that I've seen that's kind of been grayed out at the moment. It's concierge bot AI tool. It actually is a bit of a pre-during and post as well. So you can attach it to your registration websites.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:17:27]:

So if people kind of asking the same questions during registration, it can come back with some prompts rather than having to have to have a team of registration specialist sitting there helping attendees. But then on site, it's your little buddy. On-site, you can text it and say, when's my free time? When can I allocate some time to go and take a client call or what meeting should I be in at 02:00 and where is it? Give me some walking directions. You can add it to an interactive map. So all of these things that attendees would normally sit there and try to find and know self-serve, they could just ask a question and all of that information kind of comes back to them. And then, same with post, you can ask it questions about what sessions did I attend? Who did I meet with? You know, where were my notes? Like all sorts of things just to kind of help them through every life cycle of that event.

Brooke Gracey [00:18:19]:

Yeah. So sorry to interrupt, Felicia, but I have to mention this because this is something cool that's coming in the CBN product, too. That does exactly that. If you think about. You remember Spotify? Of course. Like every year in December, we're getting our Spotify wrap and we're all posting it to our Instagram and we're, you know, sharing. It's almost like that where it's like wrapped for your event experience, where it will giving you the sessions you attended, the notes, but a little bit more holistic, where it's giving you an overview of what you did. So I wanted to mention that because it's exactly what Hayley's saying, which is like, we go to these events, I spend three or four days in San Antonio.

Brooke Gracey [00:18:55]:

My head is spinning by the time I'm leaving. Right. But then I get this really nice wraps sort of digest that's created through that AI tech.

Felicia Asiedu [00:19:06]:

Well, I'm so glad you did interrupt because you can tell we both work with CBN. I was going to say exactly the same.

Brooke Gracey [00:19:12]:

I saw you.

Felicia Asiedu [00:19:14]:

No, you absolutely didn't. What it says is our internal communications are definitely working.

Brooke Gracey [00:19:19]:

Yeah, our product team is killing it.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:19:22]:

Your product team is killing it. Because I have to say, I'm very excited for that because the worst thing is when you hear from an attendee at the end of an event and they're like, oh, I didn't know XYZ, it's like, ah, it's there. It's in the app. But maybe they just couldn't find it. So now it's another way to kind of communicate all of that to all of our attendees.

Felicia Asiedu [00:19:41]:

Yeah, definitely. And I know we've been talking a little bit about, you know, connect. We've got connect Europe coming up in November in London, where we will be, you know, talking about these things a lot more. But if you do want to go back and watch the on demand of this session that actually happened at Cvent Connect in the US in San Antonio, you can go back. I think our actual attendee hub is probably just about closing because it's been probably about a month now, but we always offer our on-demand sessions in our events plus tool, which you can find on our website. So if you want to get a deeper dive than we are going in today, please do go back and watch. But I'm going to move us very quickly into our post-event experiences, and I'm doing that because I have, I'm a marketer at my core as a U brook, and I know we've always been given, like, here's a hundred sessions from connect. Do something with them.

Felicia Asiedu [00:20:35]:

Good luck. I already know that pain point exists because I hate it. I hate it so much. But give us some more. Maybe elaborate on that one and then give us some more.

Brooke Gracey [00:20:43]:

Yeah, for sure. Well, this is, the good news is that this is AI spread and butter. This is what AI does. AI was designed to look at massive amounts of data, look at it very quickly, and essentially what it's doing is it's looking for patterns. So it's looking through patterns very, very quickly. And this is the, like you said, Felicia, the key pain point after an event. The tech we're using at the event is collecting massive amounts of super valuable data for us. It's going to tell us which sessions are the most interesting, which speakers were the best? Which parts of the event were people hanging out and milling around? You know, we're using all kinds of tracking devices to help, to help do that.

Brooke Gracey [00:21:24]:

It's going to tell you satisfaction, right? We've asked them to take 101 surveys after every single session or after the event. And so you walk away with just data on data on data. And this is probably where we sometimes fail as marketers is because we're not going to be able to sort through all of that data and pull out the key things, those little nuggets of wisdom, without a lot of work. So for us as marketers, it's super important for us to find those little nuggets of wisdom in there, right? This is what's going to make our next event the biggest and the baddest. So what we really need to do is lean into this tech to help us using AI to help us get all of those data insights. I mean, providing those reports back to your management team and your leadership and all of the stakeholders you have in your event, using AI to do that. So I don't know. I'm with you, Felicia.

Brooke Gracey [00:22:17]:

I feel like it's this post event stage where we really have a ton of opportunity with Aihdem, but it also comes with a lot of questions around data privacy and things like that around accuracy, all of which we can talk about here. So, I don't want to give the impression that you go out and upload all of your data into an AI tool, and your life is going to be saved. We do have to consider some of these more security measures as well when we're doing it.

Felicia Asiedu [00:22:42]:

Yeah, and we have the added challenge in Europe of GDPR. I mean, we have the added challenge that in the first place, people don't even accept the cookies. They don't accept to be seen. So I'll give you a random during event, and then what do I do post-event? So facial recognition technology, that's, you know, looking at sentiment, but that person has opted out on the app to be like, I don't want to be seen, I don't want to be known. But they're in the room. So suddenly you've got this AI technology at the front that's like, oh, she was happy, she was sad. Can I not use that afterwards? Maybe. Probably not.

Felicia Asiedu [00:23:16]:

You know, so what, a minefield? Open a can of worms and give it to Hayley and then she'll solve it for us.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:23:23]:

Oh, yes. I solving world problems over here. I know, it's so tricky and and I know I've kind of mentioned this before, but we had one of the founders of Chap GPT come to our events. He did a keynote. It was amazing. And he's like, it's the wild, wild west. Like nothing's regulated. You almost have to put in your own rules because there's such like a gray line of, you know, all these rules are based around human interaction and what humans have done.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:23:49]:

But when it comes to, to AI, where does that sit and how does that work? So really, you have to be really careful with all of the privacy. Like, what are you uploading? Because then that is used as almost like a shared resource to then create other products or other generative kind of AI. So it is really tricky. We started talking to a company that does do facial recognition. There's a couple I know I spoke about data collab in our CVN connect session, and there's another one, Zenos, that does facial recognitions. But it's about almost as people check in, have a facial recognition where they can opt in and opt out from the beginning. So then if they've opted out, when that face is scanned, it isn't included in the results. So it's taking some steps just to make sure that you are covered.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:24:39]:

Because then if anything does happen, you know, when you get into legal trouble or anything like that, it's like, okay, well, what steps have you taken? What measures I are in place and it's kind of on the company at the moment. So it's your responsibility to do the due diligence on the products that you do use and how comfortable do you feel. And then just some other tips as well. I know you kind of spoke about GDPR and data privacy. We use some of the products to analyze results, like survey results, to see trends. You know, are people going on an upward motion or a downward motion if they're attending multiple events a year, but being smart about it, take out all of the personal information before you use an AI tool. You don't have to upload an excel document for analysis that then still contains first name, last name, email address. You can eliminate some of those details just to get your trends.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:25:32]:

So kind of thinking about it in terms of where is this information that's going that you're going to be uploading to a platform? Do you still own that information or is it now up for grabs kind of style?

Felicia Asiedu [00:25:43]:

Yeah, that's a huge discussion and it's sounding a bit doomy and gloomy. And the clouds are outside my house right now. So I'm going to brighten us up a bit. So, yes, these are all things we need to consider. Let's go back to that. What tools do I use? Conversation. So you just spoke about uploading a document. So let's say someone's got mass amounts of data in a spreadsheet.

Felicia Asiedu [00:26:03]:

Some people just know that with chat GPT. I open it up, there's a bit of a search bar looking like thing at the bottom. And I say, show me this, tell me this, make me that. If you have a massive data set, what tool are we using and is it still chat GPT to take that large data set and analyze it? What can you use to do that?

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:26:23]:

Yeah, I've tried chat GPT, I find that results never are amazing when you're trying to analyze Excel documents and trends and things like that. It's not its core. I feel like it's fine, but the results were a little hazy. One tool that I use and things that I love to do at the end of an event, because most times you get to the end of an event, you've run out of time, you're already on to the next. You kind of don't take that step of, okay, let's close this one off first. One of my favorite products is something called Ajalix. It's a program that analyzes different Excel documents. So we have events that happen year on year.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:27:04]:

You know, some of the same people might be attending. You can upload the last three years survey results. So an export from CVEN and then an import into a document and say, analyze the results, it will start to give you, you know, those trends that you're looking for. Are things improving? Which sessions look like they're good keynotes, which was the best keynote out of the different years. So I start by just asking it, analyze it, and it will provide me some information that I might not have thought about. And then I go into my questions, then I ask it the things that I want to know as well.

Brooke Gracey [00:27:42]:

And there's an interesting piece to this too, where you can actually ask AI to validate why it came to the results it did, which I think is a really interesting way of asking it to show its work, is basically what you're doing. Because we get the question all the time when we're doing these presentations is how do I know that the results I'm getting out of it are actually correct? And this is a good way to do that, is, you know, ask it to tell you how it got there.

Felicia Asiedu [00:28:10]:

Yeah, I love that there's something very technical that I'd love to talk about but totally can't. So I don't even know why I'm bringing it up. But I remember I was, I think I was on a panel with someone very technical and they were talking about it was something called either like the black box or something like that where basically there's an issue where AI can't tell you how it got to its answers all the time. And so it's like, so the validity of the data is being challenged because it itself doesn't understand how it's coded. And so it's just like, I don't know. Just because.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:28:42]:

You do need to be careful, you have to make sure it's not discriminating or providing, you know, results that you're then going to use and it's completely unbiased.

Brooke Gracey [00:28:50]:

Yeah, I mean it's the old, the data in isn't good data, the data out isn't going to be either. So if you have biases in the data that you're putting into it, which could be just normal. Right. If you're having survey responses or things like that, but the data you're going to get out is going to be biased as well.

Felicia Asiedu [00:29:08]:

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, definitely. I love this. We've, we've gone, I always say like I want to be quick but we can never be quick on a topic as good as this, you know, so we've given so many, so many hints, so many tips, so many, you know, things to consider because, you know, we don't all have the questions to AI right now. It's a lot of think about this, think about what you can do. Thanks for shouting out cvent, Hailey. I know we've got so many tools, you know, coming down our roadmap. One of the things I love already is the event comparison that we have that just came around.

Felicia Asiedu [00:29:41]:

I think it was a few months back and I was like, are you telling me I can compare all the c vent connects that we've ever had? And they were like, yes, you can. So suddenly, you know, I can just see it in one easy go. And that's what planners are essentially looking for, ease of use, not too hard. So I'm going to wrap us up a little bit with some quick fire. Are you ready ladies?

Brooke Gracey [00:30:02]:

I can't wait.

Felicia Asiedu [00:30:02]:

Brooke, give me your top. I'm going to go top five. I'm stretching it for you. Top five. Quick fire. AI tools that you're like, I do not live without. You shouldn't live without.

Brooke Gracey [00:30:14]:

Yeah. I mean start small. First of all, just go find your buddy. Mine is a sewer because my company gives that to me to use. Right. But that's number one for sure. I do love using Dolly. Dolly.

Brooke Gracey [00:30:27]:

Three, it is something that takes a little bit of work, but it's way quicker than me putting in a ticket and having my creative team and so on and so forth. Right. So I can get some really great images out of that. I have to say Cvet, right? Like, why would I not? I mean, there's so many cool, yeah. Opportunities within CvET and more on the roadmap that are super exciting to talk about. I'm a huge fan of canva. I love canva for all my design, creating presentations, even creating videos. And they have clearly put a lot of investment into AI, which I think is super awesome.

Brooke Gracey [00:31:02]:

And the next one, of course, if we're thinking about design as well, Adobe is always at the top of my list and they too are doing some really amazing things when it comes to AI functionality within the tool itself where we're already healthy. I think that was five. That might have been six.

Felicia Asiedu [00:31:17]:

That was five. I noticed in your five there was a lot of creativity in there. So that tells me about you.

Brooke Gracey [00:31:24]:

Well, maybe what it tells you about me is that I'm not creative and I need all the help I can get. There we go.

Felicia Asiedu [00:31:31]:

I'm gonna go with the first. You are very creative work and you're just trying to enhance the creativity. All right, Hayley, let's go. Quickfire, top five.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:31:40]:

I know, I feel like mine are a little bit, maybe a bit more boring. I like to kind of use it to get organized, I guess, a lot more. So, Claude, I have to say, chat a chatbot, you cannot live without it. For me, I'm terrible with writing as well. So I use things like word tune and Grammarly just to kind of fix everything that I couldn't write myself. And then I do a lot with different destinations for events. So things like placer AI and a little bit more on the boring side. But Geospark analytics, it really looks at destinations.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:32:16]:

What's in there? Hotspots. Where shouldn't you go? So it really helps me figure out where I should plan these events then kind of going, moving through the life cycle. I would say something like a beautiful AI for presentation slides, making those look really nice. I'm terrible at that. So kind of that canva, beautiful AI. Another one that I really like to make events more personable is synthesia. You can use AI to create really short videos, but make them personable. So include someone's name.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:32:51]:

Even though you've got 100 videos that you need to create, and it can come from somebody like the CEO. Once you've done a few kind of, like, facial movements and things, they can. It can make AI say anything you need it to say.

Brooke Gracey [00:33:06]:

I love this. Like, Felicia, can you imagine if you're sending out invites for connect Europe? And Reggie is individually like, hi, Felicia, we'd love to have you at CventConnect Europe. It's the coolest, right?

Felicia Asiedu [00:33:18]:

I think I have a tear.

Brooke Gracey [00:33:21]:

And that's the thing.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:33:22]:

Make it personable. Like AI, I feel like so many people are like, oh, it's so rigid, and you become a number, but use it to make it, you know, a lot more personable.

Felicia Asiedu [00:33:32]:

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I cut you short, Hayley, because you were like, oh, I have to choose one more. Okay, I'm gonna give you the pleasure of. Is there anything else? Like, you know, in our final takeaways.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:33:43]:

One that I love that I saw is called snapsites. Instead of just recording all of your sessions at all of your events, it actually records all of the text or all of the video and takes it to text. So again, you can read these little blurbs of each session rather than to have to sit through kind of like hours and hours of content. And it kind of puts it into a brain cloud. So if there's something that's really interesting to you, you can click on the brain cloud and it will show you all of the context from that session in a readable format, which I love. And then it's also more inclusive because you can translate it to any language. That's one I absolutely love. And then for quick video edits, rather than paying a huge cost for video editing after the event.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:34:28]:

I love Runway. You can blur out faces if you don't have permission to show faces or video snippets, you can take out logos, you can change colors, you can enhance the brightness. Without needing to be kind of an expert video editor or pay for an external service.

Felicia Asiedu [00:34:47]:

I'm going to take the chance to ask myself the question, because I can. So I'm going to give you two. I'll give you two. One of them is descript, which we're allowed to use in cvent. I say allowed to use because I know a lot of big corporates have to go through processes of onboarding technology as they should, making sure it's secure. So descript is one of our onboarded technologies, and it is mostly used for video editing. But what I love about descript is once you upload a video in there, it automatically transcribes it for you. It transcribes it really, really well, telling you who said what.

Felicia Asiedu [00:35:19]:

And then you can just press buttons to say, now turn this into a blog, now turn this into a social post. Now turn this into something else. So we're always talking about repurposing content and it's a big passion of mine. So I love that there's a tool that just repurposes content really easily. And then something else I saw at a leadership event that we did is called mentimeeter and I loved it. Ah, it was my favorite thing because we had all these tables doing like workshop things of, you know, around topics that we'd given them and they, it was a bit like a cahoot, you know, when you get given a code and everyone's now in the same space. And so they were telling us how they felt individually on individual tables. You know, normally you have to come back and whiteboard it.

Felicia Asiedu [00:36:00]:

They're like, right, let's get a host from each table. We didn't have to do that because mentimeter collated all the thoughts and feelings, gave us the overall sentiment towards particular topics. And then you could, if you found something interesting, drill down right then and there, you know, on the screen, so we didn't have to waste time with like the leader and the captain from each team or the whiteboard. So I was like, that's really cool. That saves time, doesn't put people on the spot, and you get overall analysis really quickly right then and there on the day. So those are my two things that I love though. Awesome. I think for those lucky people that have stayed to the end of the podcast, they have got all these great tools now that hopefully they can go away and use.

Felicia Asiedu [00:36:40]:

And if they didn't stay, shame on them. At least read the transcript. We will try our very best to get some resources into this podcast so that people have things to pick up. But if you were to leave us with one final word. Hailey, what's your final word? And don't worry about that dog, Brooke. We love a dog.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:36:59]:

It sounds overwhelming, even us throwing out all these products. It's like, oh God, still, where do I start? But find your biggest pain point. What's something that you either love doing and you want to spend some time doing it, or what's something that takes you really like takes you a really long time and you need to find a solve for. That's kind of the two ways that I looked at it. I hate writing. So for me, the first kind of AI tools were things that were going to help me write, and then it doesn't feel so overwhelming.

Felicia Asiedu [00:37:30]:

Absolutely love it. Brilliant tip, Brooke.

Brooke Gracey [00:37:34]:

So I think my biggest piece of advice is to find your people. And I think we saw this here in this conversation as well, right? Like, there is so much that we can do with AI, and there are new tools every day, and it's really hard to distill down what is going to help me? What is going to really help me do my job better. And so I just think we have to have our community and whether that's in, you know, really built in communities, maybe in the tools you use yourselves or just LinkedIn, find the people who you can relate to. That is going to give you the best advice about AI, and it's going to help you immensely if you just kind of find your people.

Felicia Asiedu [00:38:11]:

Oh, I love it. I feel like you two are some of my people. You have the same.

Brooke Gracey [00:38:14]:

You're my people for sure. Yes.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:38:17]:

We need to make these irregular.

Felicia Asiedu [00:38:19]:

Oh, definitely. Final, final thing, Hayley, where can people find you? You mentioned, you know, you're part of an agency. How can people work with you? Where can they find you?

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:38:28]:

Yeah, we're always looking for people to work with. We are huddle agency. So our website is huddle dash agency.com. you can find us through the. Contact us there. I'm on LinkedIn. Hayley Contegiacomo. I know it's a hard one to spell, but always love to have connections.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:38:46]:

I get questions all the time with AI, different products, and as Brooke said, I kind of created a little community after cvank. Connect with people that are like, I'm interested, too, you know, can we continue the conversations? So, yeah, definitely reach out and find us.

Felicia Asiedu [00:39:02]:

Awesome. Thank you so, so much for joining us, both of you. It's been a fantastic conversation and I look forward to speaking to you soon.

Hayley Contegiacomo [00:39:08]:

Sounds good. Thank you for having us.

Alyssa Peltier [00:39:13]:

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews [00:39:23]:

And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu [00:39:32]:

Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content updates and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel Andrews [00:39:40]:

Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn. Send us a DM or drop us a note@greateventseavent.com.

Felicia Asiedu [00:39:49]:

Dot big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great.

Alyssa Peltier [00:39:58]:

People, and that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.