8 Key Takeaways from Skift Meetings' AI & the Future of Events Summit

The recent Skift Meetings virtual summit on AI & the Future of Events revealed significant insights into how artificial intelligence is transforming the events industry. From personalization opportunities to post-event engagement, industry leaders shared their perspectives on navigating this rapidly evolving landscape.

1. It’s the Ideal Time to Experiment with AI

The summit opened with acknowledgement that we're experiencing an unprecedented period in AI development, making this a critical time for event professionals to explore possibilities.

"You need to get on it, playing with it, do your own research on what works for you now because when we get into agentic AI, you're already like 200 years behind," warned Anca Platon Trifan, senior manager of strategic partnerships, event technology & AI at Meetings & Incentives Worldwide. Meg Pisani, vice president of supplier relations at Maritz, also encouraged experimentation: "Keep asking questions. I say get out there and play with it. That's the only way that you're gonna love it like I do."

2. Governance Is Needed, Especially for Event Companies

With concerns mounting about sensitive data, speakers emphasized that event organizations must establish clear policies. Destinations are particularly focused on this area, with experts like Janette Roush, senior vice president, innovation & chief AI officer at Brand USA and Junanto Xu, creative and tech lead at Group NAO, involved in helping develop frameworks for responsible AI implementation.

Xu emphasized that "an AI policy is actually really helpful and it's the most foundational thing you should have when you're working with AI." Roush added a compelling analogy: "In terms of AI policy, it's important because you need to know where the brakes are on that car in order to drive the car faster."

3. Focus on Quality Over Quantity

In an ecosystem flooded with new solutions, Platon Trifan recommended focusing on mastering a few solid tools rather than chasing every new release. 

In the same session, Asaf Shuster, founder & CEO of Kampfire, proposed a framework for evaluating AI tools: "If you have to choose the right tools, you can work by the term that we coined in Kampfire, which is IQ², which stands for intelligence, quality and quantity. If the tool doesn't provide all three of them, it's probably a gimmick."

4. Personalization Is Within Reach

Michael Balyasny, founder and CEO of Highbar, discussed how AI is transforming event apps into intelligent co-pilots with advanced personalization."What's beautiful about it is that it happens automatically from the moment you start engaging with an AI native app," Balyasny explained. "Because every question you ask, every interaction you have, you're teaching that AI something in a personalized, private way that then makes every single recommendation that much more useful."

He also explained the advantages for planners. "There's nothing for event planners to configure. There's nothing to really worry about other than setting guardrails around the types of connections you want to enable, the types of questions you want to answer,” he said. “It really adds almost no overhead and out of the box just delivers really deep personalization."

5. AI-Managed Content Can Help Extend Events

Post-event engagement, traditionally challenging for planners, is seeing innovation through AI applications. Shuster presented Kampfire's AI-powered social photo sharing approach as a solution to this often-overlooked dilemma.

"The more I spoke to our customers, I realized that it's way beyond that because the post-event phase was overlooked. Two or three years ago, it was super neglected. Nobody cared about the post-event phase because most of the budget was at the event itself or the period leading to the event," said Shuster. “Now we have features that really help attendees to share [photos] on social media.”

Jonathan Easton, VP product design at Gevme, highlighted how the "superpowers of generative AI: making sense of huge amounts of content, being able to analyze it, repurposing, transforming from one format into another," power the company’s Snapsight platform focused on content summarization.

An AI-powered summary of the AI & the Future of Events virtual summit using Snapsight by Gevme can be found here.

6. Prompt Engineering Is Now a Key Skill for Planners

Elyse Dawson, senior events manager at Homrich Berg, shared five practical examples of prompts for planning tasks that surprised many attendees. These are all admin-heavy tasks, unique to planners, that Dawson has relied on AI for help with:

1. Checking media coverage on keynote speakers
2. Comparing seating charts or rooming lists for errors
3. Pricing out event menus based on a hotel offerings
4. Creating FAQs based on meeting documents
5. Defining seating charts

However Dawson admitted that the results are not perfect. Still she reassured attendees, "It doesn't have to be perfect. You can just utilize the tool and continue to improve upon that process." She described working with AI as "a process of going through, recommending more edits, and going back till you get to that sweet spot."

A related audience question came in for BrandUSA’s Janette Roush on the best way to create event proposals using AI. Roush suggested that making that request directly to a generative AI would not yield the best results. "I would take a different approach to that. I think I would probably want to take a number of proposals that my company has created and feed that into ChatGPT or Claude to serve as an example," she explained.

7. AI Can Also Help Us Be Creative

Countering concerns about AI limiting human creativity, author and speaker Henry Coutinho-Mason led an interactive session that used AI to enhance rapid ideation. He asked the audience to use a pen and paper to sketch out an innovative event networking concept, and with the help of a custom tool he turned these sketches into AI-assisted renderings. You can view some of his selections here.

Through this hands-on approach, Coutinho-Mason demonstrated a less common approach to using AI. "What if generative AI is really about creativity?" he proposed, challenging the more common efficiency-focused narrative. He sees this type becoming increasingly more common. "It turns an event from being a passive moment of consumption into a moment of co-creation and experience. And that is where I think the future of AI and events is going."

8. It’s Crucial to Assess AI's Impact

While there is no doubt the technology offers many possibilities, assessing its tangible impact cannot be overlooked. To do so, Michael Balyasny recommended focusing on measurable outcomes including time saved, new connections facilitated and actionable insights generated.

"What I loved about AI is that it gives you time back, whether you're an attendee or you're an organizer," said Balyasny. "It's the opportunity to get your attendees back to enjoying your event. It's the ability to pull away all that busywork that you might not want to do in planning and preparing for the event."

The summit highlighted the importance of assessing AI implementation through tangible metrics. Coutinho-Mason emphasized that the human element remains crucial as companies embrace AI. "The organizations that best thrive in this new world will be the ones that understand people and the ones that understand how to use this shiny new technology to deliver what people are in your context and what their audiences want."

The full event is available on-demand through free registration at https://live.skift.com/events/ai-and-the-future-of-events/ 

The summit was sponsored by Convene, whose founder Ryan Simonetti shared insights on the future of meeting spaces.