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Regardless of how we feel about AI, it’s already impacting how we travel, meet, learn and work.

Like other new technology, AI generates some fear and skepticism — not entirely without good reason. Bruce MacMillan, CPA, chief innovation officer of PCMA and one of the champions of the new SPARK AI tool, offers a perspective that may help: “It’s important to understand that this is not about technology. This is about productivity — how you do your work, just like using a computer or other tools. People shouldn’t be afraid.” To help with this, he says PCMA is running courses that demystify what SPARK AI is and how it can be used.

The 2024 Convening Leaders convention in San Diego included a lot of AI news and information, especially related to SPARK AI, a joint venture between PCMA and Singapore-based online event management company Gevme.

Project SPARK is a tool currently available free to anyone who wants to discover how AI can be used — and PCMA membership isn’t required to sign up for it. MacMillan is deeply involved with SPARK AI and a passionate proponent of harnessing it for multiple uses in the meetings and events industry. He wants conference professionals to learn how beneficial AI can be. Currently, he says, 5,000 people in 40 countries are using the SPARK tool. “Some 64% of our members/community are using AI in some form,” he says.

MacMillan and PCMA’s involvement in AI grew out of the pandemic. “In the aftermath of it many people left the industry. Meetings came back sooner than expected, which resulted in a gap between need and an adequate workforce,” he says. AI could help fill that gap.

According to MacMillan, the number one thing people use AI for is productivity. “It’s good for tasks. You can generate run of show and create event and speaker descriptions, for example. Right now, that’s what people are using SPARK for — to create content. We like to say that SPARK can do in 30 seconds or less what would take a human 30 minutes or more,” he says.

SPARK, like all AI, is evolving at head-spinning rates. “The adoption and development rates are unprecedented,” MacMillan says. “ChatGPT was the fastest ever platform to achieve over a million users. Now it’s over two million. We created this great productivity tool with SPARK AI, and now we’ve created SPARK Takeaway, which summarizes speaker presentations. The first time we used it was when the Clintons spoke at Convening Leaders in January. Every attendee received a summary of what was said. How great is that? The audience could just sit and listen, no need to take notes. SPARK Takeaway is great for education sessions as well.”

Needless to say, the SPARK summary of the Clinton’s talks took a fraction of the time it would have taken a person to create it.

The next iteration of SPARK is focused on data analytics, which can be especially important for insurance and financial meetings. “Events, particularly in the insurance and financial fields, are very data rich,” MacMillan says.

“With AI, organizers can quickly get housing, registration, specialty-education and session data, and take all of that and derive insights. If you’re in the financial field, you might be able to say, ‘Banking executives from the Midwest got this from the session or will be more likely to buy that product.’ Organizers can then quickly, and probably less expensively, get that information to their sales team to act on. They won’t have to send their data out to companies to analyze, saving them not only time but money.”

The uses for that kind of data collection are many. “If you’re an event organizer, you can get all kinds of data, such as how far out attendees are booking or registering, the price point they’re most comfortable with, and so on. You can then use that data. For example, the data may show that people are booking much closer to an event than they were two years ago — 15 or 30 days out instead of 90 days out. But hotel contracts are still basing attrition clauses on 90 days out. If you have data that your members are registering and booking housing 30 days out, you can show that to the hotel and ask them to change the attrition clause accordingly. That’s just one example of great use of the data.”

Concerns about data bias in the AI world have been raised frequently, especially relative to who feeds information into AI tools, but MacMillan is confident they’ve greatly reduced the possibility of bias in SPARK.

“Data bias is a reality everywhere. But we have filters and governance to take out the ‘toxic’ data as much as we can. Our model draws on publicly available material. We don’t input anything. We also have the highest standards, certifications and compliance possible — both ISO and SOC compliance — and that’s especially important to financial and insurance companies.”

In a world where regulation typically lags far behind innovation, it’s important for planners to use AI products that meet the requirements for privacy, safety and security. MacMillan acknowledges that there are plenty of content-generation AI products available, and they’re fine — as long as data isn’t involved. “But if data is part of what you’re using AI for,” he cautions, “then certification and compliance is paramount, otherwise your data is at risk. We routinely get asked to create security checklists by companies that want to use the product and we have no problem with that. Exposing your data to a new system is a risk, but we pass every time.”

While generative AI is evolving at lightspeed, it has many uses right now that planners can leverage. It can take one video and turn it into multiple materials for marketing and event promotion. It can identify trends, streamline tasks, synthesize transcripts, create newsletters, summarize proceedings and analyze attendee data. It can power chatbots to answer attendee questions, create scripts and itineraries, organize seating layouts, create personalized greetings and match attendees with shared interests and goals. AI translation tools can eliminate language gaps. AI can generate leads and sales and create post-event reports. Perhaps most important, it can give planners something they desperately need — more time.

But planners need to embrace it in order to reap its benefits. “Try it,” MacMillan urges. “It’s easy. That’s why we created SPARK. It’s going to help everyone in the industry to elevate their game for themselves and their audience. Once they take the first step, they’ll learn what a great product it is and how it can help them do aspects of their work faster and better.” Another strong reason for embracing AI? You can be part of its evolution. You can help direct how SPARK AI evolves so that it becomes singularly aligned with exactly what you and other planners need in the industry. “It’s hard to give everyone everything all at the same time,” MacMillan says, “but it’s the users who will shape AI. We get feedback continually and that’s what shapes what we do going forward with SPARK.”

When asked to describe how SPARK AI will impact meetings two years from now, MacMillan says the speed at which AI is evolving, “weekly at this point,” makes that hard to answer. “Two years ago, no one could have predicted what we have today,” he says.

Still, he boldly predicts that AI will be ubiquitous in our industry and SPARK will be regarded as groundbreaking. “SPARK will provide business-event participants with a personalized experience from the time they’re asked to consider registration, to personalized content offerings at the event, to personalized networking experiences and, of course, a personalized summary of their outcomes against their objectives for the event.

“SPARK AI,” he continues, “will help definitively answer the question: ‘What is the value of a given business event?’ because it will help event professionals manage, measure and extract insights from the vast amounts of data that events generate better than ever before. SPARK will be heralded as the AI pioneer that introduced AI to a global industry, unleashing the industry’s creativity and innovative energy in the process, entrenching AI as foundational in delivering next-level participant and stakeholder value.”

Maybe it’s not so hard to answer, after all.

Pros & Cons of AI for Meeting Contracts

One of AI’s many capabilities is analyzing contracts. There’s no question that AI has a role here, but there are serious caveats. While SPARK AI has the ability to analyze a contract and come up with a new clause or new wording or suggestions, an attorney should still look it over.

“We’re not trying to replace the role of the attorney,” says MacMillan. “We’re trying to accelerate the ability of our clients to deal with an attorney. It’s an accelerator that can help you shape your questions to the attorney.”

Joshua Grimes, Esq., with Grimes Law Offices in Bala Cynwyd, PA, sees positives for planners utilizing SPARK AI with contracts. “SPARK AI is a good tool for reviewing meeting and event contract clauses. It’s helpful in suggesting provisions to be incorporated into contracts and can often suggest missing clauses, or parts of clauses, that benefit either or both contracting parties.”

He adds that AI’s ability to fill in missing information may be especially helpful to planners and suppliers who don’t yet have significant experience in the industry. “It can offer particular wording or whole provisions that are customarily found in meeting/event contracts,” he notes. As for SPARK or any AI creating an entire contract from scratch, Grimes points out that even if it could, it would still need to know a planner’s preferences in order to be useful.

However, he adds, “With experience, a planner could get better at inputting prompts that are more likely to lead to contract provisions that the planner prefers.”

While SPARK AI’s model draws entirely from publicly available material, that’s not necessarily the case with other AI. “AI tools are often a reflection of the people who designed them and input the baseline information,” Grimes says. “If those designers were from one segment of the meetings/events industry — or maybe from a totally different business background — contract provisions important to a planner might be missing, or not presented in a manner most favorable to planners.”

Planners themselves also have to use the right prompts when requesting that AI develop a contract term, otherwise they may not get the correct clause. “It’s critically important to use the correct prompts to get the clause you need,” Grimes says. “The bottom line is that AI can be an important tool in contracting, but it shouldn’t be a substitute for experience and knowledge. Just as a planner’s know-how is critical to putting on an event, a competent attorney is still needed to develop a comprehensive and equitable contract.”

Everyone agrees that AI is here to stay, but caveats, at least for the present, are too. “AI and similar computer-assistance programs are likely to remain a part of the meeting and events industry because they help improve efficiency,” Grimes says. “The caveat is that they are not a substitute for experience and judgment, particularly as possessed by professionals. The need to review AI-generated work product will likely remain. This has been proven already in many industries, including law.”

For those reasons and more, Grimes isn’t worried that AI is going to replace legal expertise analyzing contracts. “Contract provisions often change over time, based on market conditions and other changing circumstances. For example, hotels now charge ‘add-on fees’ for services that used to be part of a room rate. It’s unlikely AI would be able to pick up on these changes, especially right after they’re first introduced.”

For Grimes, the bottom line is this: “While AI may provide a clause that seems legally sound, that clause may be written in a way that favors a supplier, or it may be missing critical industry-specific terms. It’s better to use AI as a drafting tool, to be used for a ‘first draft’ of a contract with review and refinements then made by an attorney or other contracting expert.”

Tyra Warner, JD, PhD, CMP Fellow, is associate professor and chair of the Department of Hospitality, Tourism and Culinary Arts at the College of Coastal Georgia. She sees the use of AI for contracts in much the same way as Grimes.

“Planners are using prompts to AI to find appropriate clauses for contracts and then comparing the AI-generated clauses with what’s in the existing contract. Alternatively, they’re entering contract clauses from existing contracts into AI and asking it to review or improve them.”

One problem with AI-created contracts, Warner notes, is that there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of contract clauses, yet that’s what AI offers, she says. “It lacks the ability to recognize the nuances of a meeting and customize clauses to the specific meeting arrangements, history of the meeting, seasonality issues and so on. AI can find information that has been input, but I haven’t yet come up with prompts that allow it to customize contract clauses with all of these factors integrated.”

On the other hand, she notes, “Whereas humans sometimes overlook something or make a mistake, AI will be more precise in what it provides.” In other words, to err is human, as the old saying goes.

Warner definitely cautions against using AI to create an entire contract. “It may not address the specific needs of the meeting or organizer. While you’ll probably get technically correct clauses, they may not be the best clauses to use. When lawyers review contracts, they keep the context of the meeting, the organizer and the other party in mind as they make revisions. When I’ve reviewed contracts, I also try to keep as much of the original language as possible in the contract, revising only what needs to be revised, not just replacing their clause with mine. This seems to make negotiations smoother. I’m not sure if AI is as good at that. I could see planners using AI to create contracts, but then sending them to a lawyer to review to cover all their bases.”

AI is included in various courses at College of Coastal Georgia and Warner believes it should be part of all hospitality programs. To planners, she says, “By all means, explore using AI as a tool but don’t let it replace common sense. It’s not going to do your job for you, it’s not going to replace times when you need the human touch for creativity, historical knowledge or nuance.”

Like MacMillan, Warner sees AI solidly in the future. “AI will be much ‘smarter’ than it is now, having garnered more data and information over the years. I think people will find ways to use it in tandem with traditional methods to improve processes and increase productivity.” I&FMM.