By using technology to make their lives simpler, planners can focus instead on networking with others and attending events. Photo by Jacob Slaton / Whatever Media Group

The world of meeting technology has evolved in dramatic ways in recent years. Just ask any corporate event planner who has been in their role for even more than a decade. Technology has truly changed how meeting planners do business and orchestrate meetings and events. Recently, one type of technology — artificial intelligence (AI) — has begun to make a name for itself through a newly developed AI platform, Spark. The brainchild of the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), Spark was introduced in a beta version in spring 2023 and has already become well known within corporate planning circles.

At its core, Spark is an AI platform filled with copious amounts of data related to event planning, as well as tools to help users in their meeting-related tasks.

“A year ago, no one had heard of ChatGPT. Today, it has over 180 million users. At the same time, event organizers all over the world told us that they were living a workplace productivity crisis,” said Sherrif Karamat, CAE, president and CEO, PCMA and CEMA. “Events rebounded faster than anyone could have imagined … but the workforce bandwidth could not keep up with the sudden business spike.” As Karamat further explained, in May of last year Project Spark was launched as an AI learning and productivity start-up for event organizers.

“In September, 64% of business event professionals were currently using Generative AI to manage their events. Spark is now the go-to AI productivity tool for almost 5,000 event organizers in 40+ countries,” Karamat said. “Corporations and organizations are now exploring with us how Spark can be integrated into their entire enterprise event operations.”

Prior to Spark launching, Beth Surmont, vice president of event strategy and design at Live360 Media, was playing around with ChatGPT, using it to help her with session descriptions and some research.

AI can help planners do everything from brainstorming to content creation, and more. Screenshot via Spark

“What I liked about Spark, and why it became my primary AI tool, is that PCMA overlaid a framework around it. I actually learned how to use AI faster because of Spark. It offers prompts, it tells you what you should ask next, it has specific categories of requests that are relevant to the events industry,” Surmont said. “What I really like about Spark is that whether you consider yourself a superuser of AI, or if you’ve never touched AI before, you will learn something about how to use AI better just by using the tool.”

Prior to Spark and AI, in general, the typical method of meeting planning involved a lot of manual work — writing of descriptions, developing formats, planning agendas and running of shows, creating invitation emails.

“A lot of the manual work that used to take hours can now be done in seconds by using Spark, Surmont said.

What further intrigued Surmont was that it was developed for the meetings and events industry. While she was already aware of AI and trying to work that into her process more, just the idea that it was engineered for event planners was really interesting to her.

Surmont’s colleague, Carol McGury, is a longtime PCMA volunteer leader. She had asked for some people at the organization, Smithbucklin, to test out the tool and provide feedback on what they thought.

“I still have my notes from that, and one thing that really impressed me was the ability to provide a video link and Spark would not only create a transcript, but it could provide a blog post, a social post, an article, etc. from the link — all generated within minutes,” Surmont said. “Repurposing content from an event is a huge missed opportunity for planners because it is such a manual process. But the idea that I could feed in some of the videos and get highlight articles that I can push back out to the community to keep them engaged and connected beyond the event is very compelling.”

Surmont also just completed a content development project for a client event. They wanted to have a session that focused on making strategic choices. She used Spark to create fictional business case studies where there were three possible choices to make about investing money and resources.

Project Spark is the go-to AI productivity tool for almost 5,000 event organizers in over 40 countries. Courtesy Photo

“I also used Spark to create a first draft of the questions for the discussion guide. I ended up with a very robust session that generated a lot of strategic conversation and led to the exact outcome the client was seeking,” Surmont said. “Creating this manually would have taken several days of research and writing. But I was able to complete the draft for their approval in about two hours.”

Kristi Casale, CMP, DMCP, is vice president for meetings and continuing education at the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry. In the era preceding Casale’s introduction to Spark, her planning tools primarily consisted of recycled templates or hastily crafted documents on the fly. When confronted with unique challenges sans existing solutions, Casale’s go-to involved extensive searches for templates or contract language online.

“The pursuit of speaker bios, in the absence of readily available information, meant repeated requests for details. Enter Spark — a game-changer that has allowed us to effortlessly extract bios by simply inputting the speaker’s LinkedIn profile,” Casale said.

Gone are the days of laboriously sifting through an overwhelming volume of survey comments, striving to distill valuable insights into a cohesive summary that accurately captures attendee sentiments. Casale said thanks to Spark, this once time-consuming task has been streamlined to the click of a button. What’s more, Spark goes above and beyond by generating actionable recommendations derived from discerned trends in attendee feedback.

“Upon hearing my colleague rave about attending Spark’s introductory webinar, my curiosity got the better of me, prompting an immediate dive into the platform. From the moment I created my profile, I found myself immersed in its seamless functionality and user-friendly interface,” Casale said. “The craftsmanship behind Spark is truly commendable, and it’s high time we spread the word about this transformative solution to any business event professional willing to lend an ear.”

Casale had been a heavy ChatGPT user so when she caught wind of PCMA’s latest project, she eagerly hopped onto the platform for a firsthand experience. The Spark sessions at Educon in Montreal proved to be an absolute highlight for her.

“Positioned in the front row, I voraciously absorbed every nugget of information and valuable tip and could not wait to implement the strategies immediately,” Casale said.

Following EduCon, Casale began playing in the Spark sandbox and she delved deeper into its capabilities and discovered myriad use-case scenarios available for immediate implementation. Initially, she found herself casually exploring the platform, testing its responses to imaginary scenarios. Once satisfied with the results, she began commanding Spark to generate real responses to the tangible problems requiring her immediate attention.

“The evolution from experimentation to practical application marked a significant turning point in my engagement with this powerful tool,” Casale added.

Michele Byers, founder and CEO of Catalyst Management Solutions, had used the typical Microsoft and Google suite of tools for her event planning as they are familiar and after many years, she is quite adept with those.

“But it’s a lot of manual data entry, especially if there isn’t any historical data, for instance with a new meeting or event,” Byers said.

Byers first heard about Spark from PCMA several months ago, when it was first released. Quite randomly, she was seated next to the president of the firm that created Spark during a leadership luncheon and they had a good conversation about the product.

“Our PCMA Gulf States chapter hosted a virtual demo and workshop for our local members, which was really well attended and got the wheels turning for me on the many ways it can be used for event planning,” Byers said.

For Byers, who had been using ChatGPT on a regular basis to help with writing prompts and Excel formulas, having a product that was developed specifically for planners was intriguing.

“I had seen some talk of how others were using it on some online and social media threads and thought I would dig in a little deeper,” Byers said.

During the Gulf States chapter demo, Byers opened the application during the session and started working through the prompts to build a marketing plan for an event she is planning in San Diego for a niche group of military and federal service physicians. It took about five minutes to enter all the relevant data and Spark provided her with an in-depth marketing plan to promote registration for the show, including strategy, messaging, cross channel integrations, target marketing, public relations, audience engagement tactics and a dynamic marketing schedule.

“I then went back and updated the prompts to focus on exhibitor and sponsor outreach, and it provided sample email messages for communicating with prospects,” Byers said. “Was it perfect? No. Was it faster than if I had to write a marketing plan by scratch? Yes, by an order of magnitude.”

Embracing Challenges

As with any new technology, challenges emerge. That’s why Surmont recommends meeting planners treat AI, including Spark, like an intern.

“It’s something that is learning, and you do need to check its work,” Surmont said. Also be sure to not put any private or personal information into the tool, that includes about you or your attendees. Similar to how you think about social media, don’t put anything in that you don’t want to appear on the front page of the news: personal information, business strategies and survey results.

“You do need to inform people if you are using AI in a way that affects them. For example, I use an AI transcriber (not Spark) on the focus group calls I run, and I am required to inform everyone I am using AI,” Surmont said.

For Casale, navigating the realm of AI often calls for a direct approach to yield optimal results and requires a number of revisions. She strongly recommends framing queries in a commanding tone rather than as mere requests to extract the most useful answers.

“I also find the login process with the one time password to be tedious, mostly annoying,” Casale said. “There’s room for improvement in streamlining this aspect for a smoother user experience.”

Future of AI

Surmont is trying to train herself to use Spark first when she approaches a task. Experts say that AI is going to be very interwoven into our work and lives in just three to five years and Surmont wants to be prepared for it.

“The other day, I had to create a job description and interview questions, and Spark created a great first draft for me. When I don’t know what to do with it, I’ll ask it — ‘I have to do this task, what do you recommend I ask you for?’ and it will give me some prompts to get started.”

Overall, Surmont believes Spark will give meeting planners back time. As she explains, event planning is consistently named as one of the top five most stressful jobs. There are long hours, tons of manual processes, and AI is like having your own set of personal assistants.

“As it becomes more sophisticated, I look forward to it being able to create menus and check BEOs [Banquet Event Orders]; laying out space in a daybook; and proofing my program against my signs and against my mobile app,” said Surmont, who also believes the program will help planners create better audience experiences.

Specifically, she loves the idea that it could analyze a schedule with 150 sessions and create individual audience journeys based on persona types. She also loves that it could make recommendations for products to see on a show floor based on the challenges an attendee is trying to solve. And she is excited that it could help with travel booking around the event schedule with the ideal arrival/departure times to not miss anything. “I also think that AI presents a huge opportunity for what events could be. Right now, we go to an event and consume a ton of knowledge, which we now synthesize into our own learnings and insights,” Surmont said. “AI does create a world where theoretically a bot could ‘attend’ an event and give you that same analysis. With this, events have to lean into the human side — the connection, the conversations, the listening and learning from peers. I think AI is a threat to events where the primary value proposition is a ton of content. So planners must focus on designing for the intentional connections that we, as humans, crave.”

Casale pointed out that the spotlight at PCMA Convening Leaders event was predominantly on AI, recognizing its disruptive force across industries globally.

“What may have escaped the audience’s notice is our industry-specific curated tool that holds the potential to save time, resources and significantly impact budgets (not to mention sanity!),” Casale said. “Whether it’s a fear of AI or a comfort zone with ChatGPT, PCMA has unveiled something remarkable that I believe more industry peers should be aware of. To my fellow business event professionals, my advice is simple: log into Spark, take it for a spin, explore its features. You might be pleasantly surprised to discover how beneficial this tool can be for you and your teams.” C&IT