One Planner’s Generative AI Journey  

When ChatGPT was introduced in November of 2022, Elyse Dawson, senior manager of corporate events at Invesco, says she “jumped online almost immediately” to learn more about AI. 

“The first thing I did was just play around and have it help me write some basic letters. Then I found the PCMA AI course (Enhancing Events With AI) one night while I was scrolling on LinkedIn, and signed up for that.”

She reached out to her company’s IT department to get access to the Microsoft Copilot tool Invesco was rolling out.

“I was self-taught. I would go on TikTok and YouTube, and look up videos to figure out how other people were using it. Every now and then, we would have a discussion group with other people at Invesco who were using it. Everyone was in different parts of the business; there was no one else in event planning.”

Skift Meetings asked Dawson how she has successfully applied AI in her role, and for advice to fellow planners who are thinking of giving it a try.

Skift Meetings: How would you describe your company’s approach to AI?

Elyse Dawson: “I would say that although it’s not a departmental initiative to use AI every day, it’s more of a supported exploration for those that want to do it and bring those learnings back to the team. It’s up to the individual planner to be proactive in their use of it.”

Have you been able to use AI to analyze data for reports to senior management?

“Definitely. I have used it for insights from post-event data, taking info from all the fields we capture in our surveys.

“I wanted to see what would be insightful for my leadership to know. It pulled up really good stats that I wouldn’t inherently have sought out.”

Can you share a routine task where the tool was helpful?

“We used it for seating charts by feeding an Excel sheet into Ivy [Invesco’s version of ChatGPT] with certain parameters: the person’s gender, where they are geographically located and their level in the organization. We asked it to mix up all the individuals with as close to an even split as possible of male and female, region and level. We said there were 10 tables and that we needed 8 people at each. And it immediately started listing them out.”

How can you use it for accounting?

“I had to break down a folio to get a rough budget for a future meeting. In the past, I would have had to print the PDF out, create an Excel spreadsheet, and go line by line plugging in the numbers and adding up the totals.

“Instead, I just fed it into Ivy and asked it to give me the subtotals based on categories. And although it was not 100% accurate, it was close enough for me to feel comfortable enough to make some educated guesses.”

Share another routine task where AI helped save you time.

“I needed to come up with speaker recommendations for an internal client. When I do this, I always Google them first, so I’m not caught off guard because they were in the headlines doing something outlandish.

“Almost instantly, it fed me back the list with articles about the speakers hyperlinked. That would have been hours worth of work. All I had to do was copy it and paste it into a Word doc.”

Many planners say they don’t have the time to learn AI. What is your response?

“Time is definitely one of the things that is keeping people away. But it’s actually a time-saver. And if you put in the time and what you tried doesn’t work, you will be more comfortable the next time.

“This is one of the lowest-risk, highest-reward things that you could put your time into.”

What projects have you set your sights on next?

“I’m going to challenge myself to do 30 days straight looking at everyday tasks that I can use AI for.

“We don’t have a set list of tasks; the sky’s the limit as far as what we can utilize AI for in our processes. I’ll just continue to challenge myself, as I’m doing something that’s very routine, to stop and think, ‘How can AI be a part of this?’”