FESTIVALS, EVENTS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

By S. David Ramirez (and ChatGPT)

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on the world. Some perspectives seem positive, with AI allowing professionals to do more with less, performing to never-before-seen levels of efficiency with a computer providing support along the way. Other perspectives decry AI as the beginning of the end. These tools will eventually evolve into SkyNet, the omnipresent intelligence from the Terminator franchise that is bent on destroying humanity.

I fall into the positive camp. As a marketer working across hospitality, tourism, and events, this technology holds great promise to allow me to work faster, take repetitive tasks off my plate, and take my creative efforts and syndicate them across mediums.

Humans have many perspectives on what AI will do for this industry, but what does AI have to say?

I asked ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, what it thought about events.

What effects will artificial intelligence have on the festivals and events industry?

It expects to affect the industry by enhancing customer experience, increasing communication efficiency, automating event planning, analyzing data, and increasing accessibility.

Some of these elements are aspirational. Many tools are in early iterations and require additional development before fully available (and affordable) to the masses. Until then, there are three places where event professionals can immediately start adding AI into the mix.

Smarter Emails

Email communication is critical to event planning but can be incredibly time-consum- ing. Event organizers must email attendees, sponsors, vendors, volunteers, and more. As events get larger and more complex, the required segmentation within these groups creates even more emails to write.

While tools like CRMs have made the “bucketing” of emails into different sequences or drips easier, most email or database tools still require someone to do all the writing. This is where AI comes in.

As AI gets smarter, it will be easier to feed in the event information and have artificial intelligence produce different iterations of content designed to make the greatest impact on their target audience. Imagine uploading all the details of your event, then having AI generate email sequences designed to influence VIPs, family attendees, foodies, or other ticket types. With a few more clicks, you have sharable event guides for vendors and exhibitors.

Specialized tools like Lavender.ai are already hitting the market, and some people in sales and sponsorship are seeing great results using them to write better outbound emails. These tools use AI to analyze data and generate personalized email content that resonates with recipients. This means that event organizers can spend less time writing emails and more time focusing on other projects.

Creating Teams

Volunteer and staff organizing is often a major time sink. Volunteer A can only work certain hours on Saturdays, and Staffer B can’t stand for extended periods of time. Accommodating and creating meaningful experiences for your front-line service workers is instrumental to retention. Rather than having your staffing teams spend weeks trying to piece together, a smart AI-assisted tool can swiftly map out staffing areas, create schedules, build shifts, and match people to those spots. This saves time and ensures that everyone is assigned to the right position.

But AI-assisted tools aren’t just limited to scheduling. Tools like Taskade take it a step further by mapping out a project and assigning staff based on skills and the order in which those skills must be applied. This feature streamlines the project management process, making it easier to visualize the work and create timelines or Gantt charts. As deadlines are met or missed, the tool will automatically update workflows, making it easier to manage the entire project.

Incorporating AI-assisted tools into event planning can significantly improve efficiency and save time, making accommodating the needs of volunteers and staff easier.

Better Media Monitoring and Social Listening

Whether you realize it or not, AI has become essential for brands to monitor media coverage and social media conversations. With AI-assisted media monitoring and social listening, organizers can quickly and easily analyze data and gain valuable insights that can help them improve their events and increase safety.

AI can help event organizers by automatically collecting and analyzing data from various media sources, such as news articles, blog posts, and social media platforms. This data can be used to track the buzz around an event, monitor sentiment, and identify key influencers who can help promote the event. AI can also provide real-time notifications when specific keywords or topics related to the event are mentioned online, allowing organizers to respond quickly and engage with attendees and potential attendees.

In the aftermath of Astroworld, one of the major recommendations was ongoing monitoring of social media and digital mentions of an event, including content from attendees, performers, and exhibitors. This information needs to be quickly analyzed, with the results made actionable by presenting it to event leadership. This can drastically reduce the time it could take for event safety teams to respond to incidents.

Another benefit of AI-assisted media monitoring and social listening is the ability to identify patterns and trends in the data. By analyzing large amounts of data over time, AI can help event organizers identify what types of content resonate with their audience and which topics generate the most buzz. This information can be used to tailor event messaging and content to meet attendees’ needs and preferences better.

Bonus: Thought Leadership

As IFEA members, we are the festivals and events industry leaders. We are often called upon to share perspectives on events and their impact on the world around us. This could be as editorials in our local newspaper, a letter from the director in the event program, or an article in “ie: the business of international events” magazine. Writer’s block or struggle with eloquence can affect even the most experienced event professional. AI can help organize ideas, brainstorm new ones, and serve as an editor.

AI is revolutionizing communication, organizing, and planning festivals and events. Expect to see even more innovative AI solutions to help us be more effective and efficient. Are you ready to embrace these latest technologies?

S. David Ramirez is the Sr. Marketing Manager for Brand & Field at TINT, a software company that builds social tools for the world’s top hospitality, travel, and tourism brands. He is the Principal Consultant at SDMramirez, a marketing strategies agency for special events and brand activations. He was recently selected as the Texas Festivals and Events Association Young Professional of the Year. David serves on the Texas Festivals and Events Association Board and the International Festivals and Events Association Foundation board. He is a marketing mentor and facilitator for organizations nationwide, including the HELM Business Accelerator, BreakFast and Launch Culinary Accelerator, gener8r (Generator) cybersecurity incubator, and the University of Texas at San Antonio Institute for Economic Development.

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