Planners Share Their AI Prompts

If there was one resounding conclusion from a session on AI Prompts during Skift Meetings’ AI and the Future of Meetings virtual event last week, it was to not be afraid to ‘play’ with AI to find ways it can help with routine tasks. 

Speakers Elyse Dawson, senior events manager at Homrick Berg, and Meg Pisani, vice president of supplier relations at Maritz, shared how they are using ChatGPT and Copilot for tasks ranging from seating charts and menu planning to everyday emails.

“Just know that it doesn't have to be perfect, and you can just utilize the tool and continue to improve upon that process,” said Dawson as she kicked off their talk.

Here are 5 tasks where the two speakers described their use of prompts:

Speaker Selection

A process that used to involve Dawson researching hundreds of pages about every potential speaker on Google to make sure there was nothing negative in their histories has been reduced to 19 seconds.

“I put a list of all of the speakers into AI with this prompt: ‘I am reviewing keynote speakers. Please provide any negative press or headlines about the following people.’

“I had the results in 19 seconds,” she said. “I couldn't do this in 19 minutes if I had to. Not only was it a timesaver, but it also included the links to the articles, so I could share them with my stakeholders.”

Menu Planning

As Dawson put it, when it comes to menu planning, “Sometimes you need a little help — a jumping-off point.”

She loaded a 100-page PDF with all of the different menus from a hotel into AI, then used this prompt: ‘Create a breakfast and lunch menu for $80 per person, before taxes and fees.’

“Then I went back to the AI and said, ‘Now include taxes and fees and tell me what the total would be.’ That gave her the before amount and the amount including the taxes and fees. 

“Instead of having to wait until you get your BEO to get the surprise fees, you can see that upfront. It also gave me a great starting point for those groups that are more budget-conscious.”

FAQ Document

Many companies list general policy information and guidelines on their intranet sites, but to make it easier for attendees to get answers fast, Dawson created a targeted FAQ document for her meeting. “I just fed the entire 20 pages into Copilot and said, ‘Based off of this document and all of the areas contained in this document, create an FAQ file for a meeting attendee.’

“It pulled out the top 15 questions people are always going to ask, such as ‘What are our travel restrictions when it comes to flying first class? What are our meal cap policies?’ All of those quick-hit questions are now listed in a one-page document.”

Seating Charts

“There are so many different layers in planning seating charts — female-to-male ratio, the region people come from, the level within the organization,” Dawson said. “All of these are factors in planning seating charts, and depending on the historical nature of the events, you're also going to compare last year over this year.”

She started the process by putting the Excel attendee file into AI, with the prompt: ‘I am looking to build a seating chart for this event. Review this document, keeping under consideration gender, region, and level in the organization, and create a seating chart for me.’

“It read the file, and it pulled out all of the column headers. Then it asked the following question: ‘How many people would you like at the table?’ which is the great thing about AI. It is intuitive to answer and ask the questions that you might not be thinking of because I didn’t put that in my initial prompt.

“Also, I needed to tell it that we only want to use every person once. The first three times I did it, it wasn't exactly right. It did repeat a person. So it is a process of going through, recommending more edits, and going back until you get to that sweet spot.”

Emails

Pisani uses Copilot to help her craft emails. She finds it to be intuitive and to follow whatever tone she indicates.

She recently had to craft an email to her team to get them to start using AI. “I put in a prompt that said: ‘Please create an email to my team to ask them to use Copilot and share the benefits of doing so.’”

When the email came back, it was long, with in-depth descriptions of the functionality of AI and the tasks it could be used for. She asked it to shorten it, and it returned with 5 bulleted highlights.

Then she returned again, to ask for a version for her senior executives. “I asked: ‘Can you make it more concise for senior executives?’ Because I don't need all the verbiage that I needed for training my team. The senior executives just wanted to know what I was doing with AI.

“And it did it.”