Now is the time for event organisations to start experimenting with AI tools if they aren’t already, otherwise they could get left behind, according to AI expert Katie King.
In her keynote session at micebook EXPO in partnership with Speakers Corner, King, who has written two books on the topic and was voted a leading AI Strategist and Top 10 AI influencer in 2023, urged the audience to adapt and explore the opportunities offered by AI rather than fear it.
“I like to talk about AI as augmented intelligence, rather than artificial intelligence. It’s about imitating intelligent human behaviour,” she said. “It’s not about trying to take your jobs away, it’s an assistant, an ally, that can give you insights to help you do what you do so much better and save you hours of time.”
In a starting poll she asked the audience what they most feared about AI and the top answer was ‘changing our culture and dehumanising us’. She then went on to dig deeper, providing insights with tools and frameworks on how to implement AI into your organisations with a scale/marker system to work through to assess where your organisation is at with implementation.
Here’s some of the key takeaways from the session:
- We must be careful that we always keep a human in the loop when we work with this kind of technology.
- AI can touch and improve all the different job functions across your business, from sales and marketing to HR.
- The biggest benefit of AI to you is making sense of your data. It can provide detailed insights, not finger in the air guesswork, about the type of delegates that are coming to your events, or about your target market or the industry sector that you focus on. Those insights are going to help you deliver a much more personalised service.
- It’s not all about ChatGPT. There are lots of tools out there that can do some of the grunt work and make us more productive. Many of these are very affordable and suitable for small businesses. This is not just a domain dominated by big brands.
- Have a clear objective and really strategise and understand what you are trying to achieve, because however good these tools are – they are not going to do that strategy piece for you.
- Regulation and compliance is moving very fast so make sure you are aware of that and get involved in the conversations.
- Consider if you have the talent in-house to take advantage of AI. If not, you need to think about how you upskill and train, how you outsource, and how you hire so you can take advantage of it.
- You need a roadmap and a strategic plan. Do you want to be an innovator or are you prepared to be a laggard and sit back and wait for everyone else to do this. You might run out of time.
- Think what new behaviours you and your teams need to be doing. Do you need to set some processes in place? You could have a weekly or monthly meeting with a committee of people who are the go-to AI people for each department. They can become the team that are responsible for best practice.
- Look at what other events organisers around the world are using. Then go away and do some due diligence and experiment. Sign up for some of the tools available, play around with them, if they are great buy them, and maybe start just by committing them for a short period of time. But do it now!