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Authentic attendee feedback is one of the best kinds of data an event planner can collect. But it can also be the most difficult to capture. When it comes to event data and analytics, AI is proving to be vital.

StreamAlive CEO Lux Narayan remembers sitting in a string of Zoom, YouTube and Facebook live webinars during the pandemic. He thought about the limited nature of the interactions between presenters and attendees. Long story short, he says, is that there was a lot of lip service to people’s answers when they were asked a question. That became the genesis of StreamAlive, a generative AI presentation creator: to give the audience a voice and make virtual live sessions a lot more engaging by collectively visualizing the audience’s responses to various prompts that the presenter gives.

Event Data

Event data is the information planners capture that tells the overall success story of meetings and events. This information, or data, is then analyzed to provide valuable insights to help planners plan accordingly for future events. The kinds of data event planners look for include:

• Registration information, such as attendee preferences and demographics
• User behaviors that show how attendees interacted with content, breakout sessions, speakers and other activities
• Feedback gathered from attendees through surveys and other post-event assessments that can be used to guide future event planning
• Information on which sessions or activities drew the most attendees

Planners also measure speaker performance, networking interactions, technology usage, sales, revenue and even on-site movement.

Event Analytics

Event analytics is essentially a guide that planners use to organize the data they collect. It’s important because planners can use this organized data to track trends, patterns and behaviors during events so they know what aspects of the event were successful and which ones need improvement, as well as how to allocate budgets for future events.

Using AI for event analytics can help planners by automating tasks, analyzing large datasets, identifying patterns and trends and providing insights for decision-making. It can be used for every step of the process, from data collection and analysis to preparation and interpretation. While there are a variety of software tools that are capable of doing all of these tasks, AI makes the data analytics process much faster and more efficient.

Capturing Interactions

StreamAlive uses generative AI to quickly generate polls and open-ended questions the presenter can use as conversation starters to encourage participation. Then that audience interaction is captured and applied through the platform’s suite of visual tools, such as Wonder Words for word clouds as well as Talking Tiles, which can record up to 80 seconds of speech from participants. These features are integrated with the chat functions of Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, YouTube Live and Twitch.

“We use the comments per minute as a surrogate for engagement,” says Narayan. “If you ran an interaction that elicited a huge amount of commentary in terms of people responding, answering the prompt that you asked, that’s a good surrogate for the fact that people were engaged and participating and giving their opinion, as opposed to not doing so.”

StreamAlive also allows for planners to see the visual richness of the interactions, says Narayan. At the end of the event, the platform gives a summary of what attendees said and when there was a spike in terms of engagement.

Another platform using AI to analyze analytics is OneSystem Plus, which constructs narratives to guide marketing and pre-event strategies. For post-event analytics, AI is used to scan attendee feedback so planners can generate agendas and presentations for future events.

While new event planning platforms are being integrated with AI and current software such as SurveyMonkey is being upgraded in a race to keep up, how are event planners using these tools to analyze their data?

“Humans have a tendency to see patterns, even when patterns are not there,” says David Ramirez, senior marketing manager of events & partnerships at Tint, a San Antonio-based company.

“We’re great at pattern recognition, but sometimes if you are doing the qualitative piece where there’s not a number output or something that you can just run through Excel, you may start to see things that you may not realize or may not see. Even things like micro-trends, you miss them because you can’t see the forest through all the trees, right?”

Ramirez uses AI to take results from open-ended questions from attendees, vendors and stakeholders, aggregate them into categories, demographics and psychographics, and then tag the outcomes back to specific audiences or stakeholders that he’s trying to improve or enhance his event for. Aside from his role at Tint, Ramirez is a seasoned festival and event consultant and is on the board of the Texas Event Management Institute, among other titles. He refers to himself as “an event nerd,” so AI comes in handy for him, especially when handling large amounts of data. Some of his go-to tools are ChatGPT, Akkio and even his company’s CRM.

“Being able to think specifically about the sub-audiences within your event, a lot of event planners do a little bit of pre-work, designing their ideal customer profile, their ICP, and a lot of that is based on those aggregate research stats and anecdotal information,” he says. “But now, we can actually track back and say, ‘Oh, these are the actual job titles of the people that attended my meeting or conference. These are the actual industries and verticals and company headcounts of the people that attended.”

These insights can be tracked down to an individual level, Ramirez says, which can be used to bring in better speakers and content providers to better match vendors in exhibitor spaces and to the attendees themselves. They can even be used to help source missing sponsors that could be relevant to a strongly represented but smaller audience that might have been overlooked in the planning process.

One of his personal favorites, however, is Apollo, which planners can use to upload lists of organizations to get the ideal contacts needed for invites, sponsorships and collaborations. What used to take months now takes minutes. Then, Ramirez takes that data and puts it into ChatGPT to recruit those contacts for his events, outlines goals and then designs a multi-touch sequence that he can then distribute to other conference committee members as part of the touch cadence to send out postcards and emails.

“Instead of me, as a marketing technology person, sitting here trying to map out what the ideal frequency for that is, especially for this large of a campaign, just having a little bit of assistance so I can focus on the creative piece and not have to spend my brain power focusing on kind of the minutiae and the more administrative stuff is helpful,” says Ramirez.

Sekeno Aldred is the director of learning programs and events at Goodwill Industries International in Rockville, MD. She’s another planner who uses AI to help her analyze event and meeting data. She’s been using it for about eight or nine months, she says. Her department uses Smartsheet to create evaluations and capture the qualitative data she needs, such as the themes and priorities that need to be addressed.

“The qualitative data, that usually is the hardest to capture, right? In the past, we would need to, and actually we still do, collect the themes we are hearing to be able to report back out to the planning committee or the planning teams, and so that would take forever,” says Aldred. “I actually would procrastinate on doing it because of the time it would take … It’s kind of like playing Tetris, right? You’re throwing them into columns and you potentially could miss some information.”

Now, Aldred simply inputs the data into AI and gives it a command to provide her the themes and the priorities, for instance, and AI gives her the information she needs in seconds.

Aldred also uses AI in many other ways, such as note-taking during meetings, doing speaker research, marketing and brainstorming ideas. “I have fully embraced it because I see how much time it saves me and streamlines it better than me,” she says.

Time to Embrace AI?

Jessica Rife manages all of the conferences and events at ESource, a research, consulting and data science services firm that helps companies in the utilities sector reduce operational costs through decarbonization, electrification and technology strategies. While Rife only uses AI for marketing copy, she envisions a time in the future when she may use AI for other aspects of her work. Currently, she uses Marketo, Salesforce and Tableau to analyze her event data, which all have AI functionality. While she hasn’t utilized those tools yet in her event planning work, she can see a time in the future when these options could prove to be viable.

“We have such a unique situation,” says Rife. “Most of our prospects are our current clients, so there is some manual work involved, too. At some point, it may make sense to explore how AI can help with this [data analysis], but for now, we are only using it for marketing copy purposes.”

While AI is only in its infancy, what it can do to help planners analyze data is nothing short of amazing. And its potential is huge. That means that planners who haven’t embraced it yet should think about doing it.

“Time is the biggest denominator,” says Aldred. “We’re moving so fast. So, in terms of competition, you’re behind if you’re not embracing it, because other people are using it to their advantage.” C&IT