Hailed as the world’s leading business strategist, award-winning expert witness, strategic consultant and professional speaker, Scott Steinberg is among today’s best-known trends experts and futurists, and the bestselling author of “Think Like a Futurist;” “Make Change Work for You: 10 Ways to Future-Proof Yourself, Fearlessly Innovate, and Succeed Despite Uncertainty;” and “Fast >> Forward: How to Turbo-Charge Business, Sales, and Career Growth.” The president and CEO of BIZDEV: The International Association for Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, his website is FuturistsSpeakers.com.

As you may have noticed, cutting-edge new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are currently surging in interest and uptake with meeting and event planners. Whatever your preferred solution (e.g. ChatGPT or Google’s Bard) or current need, a host of both dedicated AI solutions and smart-assistant-powered tools are quickly making MICE industry leaders’ jobs that much more manageable. Looking ahead, you’ll soon be able to turn to an endless range of smart solutions and online pay-as-you-go AI providers for help with tasks such as conference planning/organization, program design and content development. Wondering how all this fun and futuristic technology can help you build better conferences, tradeshows and get-togethers? Below, you’ll find 10 helpful ways that these cutting-edge new high-tech advancements can help you lighten your workload, enhance attendee experience and usher in a new era of hyper-productivity.

Planning and Logistics: AI tools can now aid with event planning and research, including vendor and destination selection. You can also use them to get a handle on potential event costs, revenues and budgets, or even price out specific suppliers, vendors and travel options. From helping to identify the right conference center at which to host your programs to determining how much you should be spending on AV setups, catering and lodging, options are endless here, and they’ll only continue to grow going forward.

Programming and Content: Need help coming up with new ideas for content tracks and individual sessions? Machine learning tools can help you determine what subjects most resonate with audiences and brainstorm new topics, ideas and formats for meeting and event sessions. You can even leverage these tools to identify guest speakers, virtual presenters and thought leaders to work with. In effect, AI-powered solutions can assist with everything from coming up with potential event concepts to designing meeting tracks and programming for educational certification programs.

Branding and Positioning: Using automated assistants as creative foils, you can ask for help brainstorming and ideating event themes, positioning, messaging and angles. Likewise, you can also use these tools to determine your program’s unique sales points, and how to best differentiate and communicate your event’s benefits and upsides to potential attendees.

Marketing and Advertising: Wondering who your event should be targeting with communications outreach efforts, and the best channels and ways to connect with them? AI-powered solutions can help you identify target markets; come up with new ideas for campaigns and craft advertising, marketing and promotions plans; and create mobile, online, social media and marketing copy or content.

Social Media and Online Outreach: Having trouble generating enough multimedia or copy to fill all your online marketing channels, publications and social media feeds? You can ask AI tools to create articles, blog posts, website copy and product brochures, or summarize longer pieces of content into more social-media friendly write-ups as well.

Customer Service and Support: If you’re looking for a cost-efficient way to answer attendees’ questions or field customer service queries, you can have smart software personalities (aka “chatbots”) that are intelligent enough to pass as human handle them. Likewise, you can also turn to AI assistants for help powering through back-office functions and managing support tickets as well.

Newsletters and E-Mail Messaging: Hoping to boost audience engagement? You can leverage automated e-email newsletter programs to quickly populate pre-programmed mailings with relevant articles and data, then analyze open and response rates to improve send times and mailing frequencies too.

Transcriptions and Recaps: AI-powered transcription tools such as Otter can help you capture and share event learning and content to boot. Likewise, automated assistants can help you design presentations, write intros and speeches, and summarize event learnings and takeaways for later browsing by attendees.

Task Assignment and Research: Autonomous AI “agents” like AutoGPT and AgentGPT are capable of self-directing themselves to perform multiple steps in sequence and complete complex tasks with limited human prompting. Drawing on AI algorithms like ChatGPT as a knowledge base, they can be given a complex task that requires a series of steps (i.e. finding the 10 best hotel properties to host a convention at in Fall in New Hampshire, and pricing them out in a spreadsheet), and sent off to perform it and report back.

Feedback and Submissions: Automated analytics tools can help you analyze and identify key insights based on data and information that you’re collecting from attendees. For example: You can tap them to review online visits to your event’s website to see which topics and speakers most resonate with your target audience, or parse ticket purchases to see which offers or pricing plans are most popular. Alternately, you might use these tools to monitor your tradeshow’s mobile app and see which sessions and tracks are getting the most interest or track social media activity to determine which topics are currently trending in your industry. C&IT