Is ChatGPT about to Change the Events Industry?

My newsfeed and marketing emails, in fact, the entire world, are talking about ChatGPT. Like everyone else in marketing, I am starting to think about how I could (or should) use ChatGPT to make my life easier. An obvious answer is creating written content, as so much of my time is spent copywriting, but something doesn’t quite feel right. Should I refrain, or will I get left behind as the rest of the world starts getting AI to write their blogs, social posts, and mailers?

To help me figure it out, I decided to see what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to write the latest Event Tech Insider article, so I typed in “How can ChatGPT help the events industry?” and here’s what it came up with…

ChatGPT can help the events industry in a variety of ways, such as:

1. Event Planning and Scheduling: ChatGPT can assist event planners with scheduling and organising events by generating agendas, creating to-do lists, and sending reminders.
2. Customer Service: ChatGPT can be integrated into a website or mobile app to provide customers with instant support and information about upcoming events.
3. Marketing and Promotion: ChatGPT can help event organisers generate compelling copy and messaging for promoting events on social media and other platforms.
4. Virtual Event Assistance: ChatGPT can help with Virtual events by interacting with attendees, providing information, answering questions, and helping with virtual check-ins and the registration process.
5. Data Analysis: ChatGPT can be used to analyse data collected from events such as attendee feedback, ticket sales, and social media engagement to gain insights and make data-driven decisions.
6. Automation: ChatGPT can automate repetitive tasks, such as sending out confirmation emails and reminders, which can save event organisers time and resources.
7. Cost-effective: ChatGPT can be a cost-effective solution compared to manual labour and multiple software solutions, as it can handle many tasks and respond to inquiries in real time.
8. ?Personalisation: ChatGPT can be trained to provide personalised recommendations, offers, and suggestions for events based on the user’s preferences, interests, and past interactions.

OK, so my first impression was, that’s impressive! But this soon turned into mild panic as I started imagining dystopian futures and the end of humankind as we know it. But that’s for another blog and one that isn’t called the ‘Event Tech Insider,’ so getting back to the case in hand, I decided to dive deeper to see if ChatGPT could actually do the things that it was purporting to, and so challenged ChatGPT on each point.

I started by giving ChatGPT the name, date and time, location, and purpose of our next tradeshow (International Confex), along with some specific topics we will focus on while exhibiting. And I asked it to come up with an agenda. The results were pretty impressive:

Day 1: March 1st

• 9:00am - 10:00am: Registration and Networking
• 10:00am - 11:00am: Opening Keynote: Welcome and Introduction
• 11:15am - 12:15pm: Session 1: TikTok Optimised UGC
• 12:15pm - 1:15pm: Lunch
• 1:15pm - 2:15pm: Session 2: Cloud-Based Event Technology
• 2:30pm - 3:30pm: Panel Discussion: Leveraging UGC and Cloud-Based Technology for events
• 3:45pm - 4:45pm: Session 3: Meeting new clients and catching up with old ones
• 5:00pm - 6:00pm: Networking Reception

Day 2: March 2nd

• 9:00am - 10:00am: Registration and Networking
• 10:00am - 11:00am: Keynote Speaker: How to optimise your UGC campaigns
• 11:15am - 12:15pm: Session 4: Cloud-based Event Technology case studies
• 12:15pm - 1:15pm: Lunch
• 1:15pm - 2:15pm: Workshop: Implementing Cloud-Based Technology in your events
• 2:30pm - 3:30pm: Session 5: Best practices for UGC campaigns
• 3:45pm - 4:45pm: Q&A and Closing Remarks
• 5:00pm - 6:00pm: Networking Reception

Although not entirely appropriate for a tradeshow, there’s no arguing that the agenda that ChatGPT produced is impressive and, at the very least, is good for ideas. In fact, if a colleague came to me with the same agenda, I would be pretty happy.

On schedules and reminders, it didn’t fair so well, replying to my query with; “I’m sorry, I am a text-based model and do not have the capability to schedule reminders/events.”

I then looked into integrating ChatGPT into our website so that it could support visitor queries. However, I quickly concluded that too much custom dev would be needed, and time would be better spent writing some FAQs and providing a contact form. I am sure that integrations and plugins for CRM and CMS platforms will soon arrive, but my feeling is that, at this stage, ChatGPT presents too much risk to be used as a customer service tool.

The next suggestion from ChatGPT was to write “compelling copy and messaging” for the event... See the grab for what happened.

Although not an exhaustive test, the outcome demonstrated ChatGPT’s strengths and limitations. Its obvious strengths are in forming prose around facts which you lay out for it, perfect for basic, short-form copy to be skimmed by the reader or for informational text. The obvious limitation is that it lacks nuance, and if you or your company has rules around copywriting or if you adhere to a particular ‘tone of voice’, ChatGPT just doesn’t cut it.

So, how does ChatGPT compare as a Virtual Event Assistance? For this, I refer you back to my point on using ChatGPT for customer service, it’s just not ready (yet).

Next is the analysis of data, see the grab to see how that went down.

At this point, I realised that quickly pivoting the CSV in Google Sheets instead of continuing with ChatGPT would be a lot quicker and easier. It’s fair to say I won’t be using ChatGPT for data analysis again any time soon.

Lastly, I came to the last three suggestions provided by ChatGPT: automation, cost-saving and personalisation. At this point, I am beginning to get frustrated. ChatGPT lists things that sound convincing, but as soon as you delve deeper, you realise that you can’t practically do anything with the information it’s giving you. I then realise that of all ChatGPT’s shortcomings, the fact that you can’t ultimately trust it’s output is probably the most significant. What it does is clever but, one-dimensional. In the time it takes you to scrutinise and edit (or bin) what it’s saying, you may as well have just done the work yourself.

So, how will I use ChatGPT in my marketing role in the Events Industry? At this formative stage of the platform, the answer would be to use its assistance when I have writer's block, purely for it to generate some inspiration to spark some ideas, and it could help me with an agenda or two, but beyond that it’s work as usual... Having said that, with the rush of popularity flaring rapid development in Open AI, I will probably be changing my tune 12 months from now.

Find more exciting articles, insights, and news; as well as technology that actually elevates your events,?here.