GlobalMeet’s Ken Roberts on how AI can improve meetings and events.
Ken Roberts is the chief technology officer at GlobalMeet, a scalable, flexible and secure event solution built and backed by event professionals who have extensive experience in facilitating engaging and accessible virtual and hybrid events. We had a conversation with Ken recently to get his thoughts how AI is impacting virtual and in-person events and how organizations can use this tool to enhance an organization’s meetings strategy. Here’s what he had to say.
MeetingsEvents: How will AI make content more accessible to attendees both in live time and post-event?
Ken Roberts: Attending a live event, whether virtual or in-person, can be overwhelming. Multiple session tracks, difficulty identifying and networking with other attendees, and avoiding event fatigue are all hindrances to maximizing what attendees can reap from an event. AI can play a role in helping these factors. An AI engine can help suggest sessions or content tracks that align best with attendees’ profiles or interests. Similarly, an AI-matchmaker can help attendees find and connect with other attendees who share similar interests. Furthermore, imagine an AI reminder to stand up, take a breath, or participate in a fun activity that allows you to recharge and get back to the event refreshed and ready for more.
MeetingsEvents: What will AI add to events both (virtual and hybrid) that will make it easier to market future events to potential attendees?
Ken Roberts: Often, potential attendees like to get an idea of the content or style of an event before committing to attending or buying a ticket. The best way to provide this is by showing the highlights of previous events. However, sorting through hours of event footage to create a 30-second highlight reel is a time-consuming task that many organizations may not have time for. Using an AI engine to identify the most interesting or engaging snippets from an event could help automate or drastically reduce the amount of time spent creating a highlight reel. This, in turn, would help market future events and increase attendance.
MeetingsEvents: Can AI make events more accessible to attendees with hearing impairments, language barriers, or other accessibility needs?
Ken Roberts: This area is where we think it’s important to differentiate between AI and good ol’ automation. We’ve already seen and utilized a great deal of automation that helps make our events more accessible to those with various types of needs. Automated and human-generated captions and translations make event content available to those who speak a different language than the speakers, have a hearing disability, or absorb information better by reading rather than listening. AI could further enhance these features by using contextual data to improve the accuracy of automated captions or translations.
MeetingsEvents: How will AI make the pre-planning of virtual and hybrid events? How will it make the live execution of these events easier?
Ken Roberts: There is a tremendous amount of content that is required for a virtual or hybrid event. Consider all of the content that needs to be written for emails and ads that promote the event, summaries, and speaker bios for the event registration pages, and supporting content that is available during the event itself. We’ve already seen the benefit of AI in helping marketers write blogs, emails, and web pages. Bringing content-generating AI algorithms into the event setup tools would help improve the content itself and reduce the time spent creating it. Now, we’ve also seen that there can be big problems when using AI-generated content without properly reviewing and editing the content before publishing. I believe when used properly, an AI engine can help an event team take an initial well-written event summary and create starter content for all of the required content areas. Often, AI may find new and interesting ways to convey a message. Then, the event team can use their time reviewing and adjusting the AI-generated content resulting in potentially more engaging content created in a fraction of the time.
Any thoughts, opinions, or news? Please share them with me at vince@meetingsevents.com.
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash
