“We need to become prompt engineers…”

A consensus is forming around the idea that, much like the invention of the internet, this is a watershed moment for our relationship with technology. Here, Alon Alroy, co-founder of Bizzabo, shares his thoughts on what ChatGPT et al might mean for the events industry…

It’s the biggest revolution since the internet, and the pace at which things are evolving is crazy. Most people do not understand the tectonic shift that is happening, and how it will influence everything we do.

Event professionals are passionate about building memorable experiences, they’re not really excited about writing templates or sending emails. AI has the potential to streamline many of the workflows involved with producing an event, and in terms of event ideation, it can help you produce some very good ideas, very quickly. For example, I had an idea for a tagline for an event and AI helped me ideate many, many different alternatives. So instead of my team coming up with three ideas, we had 50 ideas within 30 seconds.

AI can free up event planners to focus on more creative tasks while delivering the scalability that lean event teams need. And it came at exactly the right time! Everyone was being asked to do more with less - and suddenly you get this thing that is all about doing more with less.

There are many unknowns about ownership and plagiarism and accuracy and relevancy and privacy. There’s a lot to learn and it will become more challenging because the amount of AI chatbots and tools continues to grow. It can be overwhelming, and you might just want to hide and to wake up when it’s done.

But it’s not going to be ‘done’.

The good thing is event planners are masters at the art of adaptability, we saw that in the pandemic, they are experts in contingency planning. So, I’m hopeful that in the same way event planners became experts at virtual events, they will become experts in leveraging AI to support their day to day.

You should trust it the same way you
trust things on Google. You should not trust everything you read on the search engine. It depends on the source. It depends on when an article was written.

So now you look at the date and you think, ‘This is from 2016. I’m not sure if I can trust it.’ Or, ‘This is from a blog I never heard of, I’m not sure if I can trust it.’ Having said that, we trust Wikipedia -mostly - and that’s because it’s based on the wisdom of the crowd.

Similarly, the more we use AI, the better it should get.

Things look a little bit clunky and scary, and the interface is not as user-friendly as it might be, but this is one of the most important times in technology. The earlier you dive in, the better you’re going to be because you’re going to have a personal competitive advantage over your peers.

We don’t need to understand the technology because we’re not developers.

We need to become prompt engineers. A prompt is the query that you ask the AI, and the better you are at asking questions, the more accurate and the better output you’re going to get. And those who master that will be better than their peers at what they do. Your job will not be replaced by AI, it will be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.

Imagine a world in which someone walks into an event and the AI assistant on their mobile app is just chatting with them about, ‘Hey, what type of content do you want to consume today?’ ‘What type of people do you want to meet?’ It’s that kind of personalised experience that’s going to be the next level for AI in events. And once you have that, just think about the power it gives to the organisation itself in terms of data.