Yes, More AI Talk…But This Could Transform Your Next Event

[00:00:00] Marco Ogsimer: I think it doesn't replace the human touch, but it's just there to amplify it. You have to see AI not just as a tool, but as a teammate. Like what any other teammate would do, it'll make your work better and faster and smarter. I think we have to think it that way. 

[00:00:17] Alyssa Peltier: Great events create great brands. But pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences? Well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa. 

[00:00:30] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel. 

[00:00:31] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia. 

[00:00:33] Alyssa Peltier: And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. I am pumped for this week's episode because let's be real. We are all talking about AI and that's what this week is all about. Guest hosted by fellow Cventer and product marketer, Brittany Fisher, Brittany chats with Marco Ogsimer, Director of Event Tech, and Kevin Cobb, VP of Strategic Marketing, both from Augeo. This episode will explore how AI is reshaping the events industry, not just by saving time, but by changing how experiences are created, how teams work, and what engagement really means. Through a thoughtful discussion, we'll explore what's shifting, what's possible, and what event professionals and marketers should be thinking about now in an era of AI.

[00:01:31] Brittany Fisher: Hi everyone. My name is Brittany Fisher. Before we get started, I just want to do a little bit about me and then we can dive into it. I am on our product marketing team here at Cvent, and about two years ago I took over being our product marketer for Cvent AI, or as we now call it Cvent IQ. It has become a passion of mine and my literal job. We're going to dive into the big topic of today, which is AI. We've all seen the headlines, we've all heard about it, but what I feel like the question is still is, what is the impact of AI? Does it just help with rewriting content or does it make an actual impact on our jobs? Is it going to change the way that event planners do their jobs?

To answer that, I'm joined by two amazing AI experts here that are going to be perfect for this conversation. Marco Ogsimer, an event technologist, and Kevin Cobb, a VP of Strategic Marketing for Augeo Marketing. They both have an impressive background in the events world and technology shaping our industry today, and they make a great pair for today. Let's get into it. What are some of the ways that AI has changed how you plan or run events and what has been the impact of that?

[00:02:43] Kevin Cobb: Cool, thanks Brittany. I think I'll start on this one. I think just the whole rest of the world, AI is fundamentally shifting how we go about doing our work day in, day out. I've often said it's one of those things that can change the most or the hardest piece of event planning, which is you never have enough time. There's never enough time in the day, there's never enough hours to get everything done to make it as good as you want. Every time you execute a great event, it comes off, it's wonderful, then it has to be better next year. It's this idea of how do I create time and this tool, this fundamental tool that's shifting the way we work in AI, is one of those things I think that you're seeing can actually do that.

I think we now have something available to us that we're all learning. It makes me a little uncomfortable to hear the word AI expert. I don't know of many of those in the world right now, but it is something I would say I continue to be overtly AI curious. I think for the event world, it's about how can I use these tools that are changing what human beings are capable of, to give me the thing that I can't create in any other way, which is more time. I think beginning to train additional use, which is part of what you can do with AI, can create hours in the day and make you focus on the creative, the fun, the better, the better, the better. I think that is something that is fundamentally different about AI and especially in the event world. It's going to rock everybody's world.

[00:04:20] Marco Ogsimer: Yeah, I also think that AI is not just improving efficiency, but it's really changing the way that we work with events. There are now generative AI that would spit out agenda in a second. There are AI now who can produce visually rendered venues instead of doing those complicated and complex software tools. I feel like AI is really making us, not just more efficient or not just to move faster, but to move smarter and more creative than ever before because of all of these tools.

[00:04:54] Kevin Cobb: That's a good point. How many times have you been asked, "Do you have any more ideas?" You give them three great ideas, "Do you have more ideas?" You're like, "I'd love to have more ideas except I have to spend the next two and a half hours doing version one and two and three of the notes and the emails and the timeline," and all of that kind of stuff. You offload that to AI who understand you, who knows what you want, and then away you go. You can have two or three more additional creative ideas and maybe that two or three is the one that changes your whole event.

[00:05:24] Marco Ogsimer: Exactly.

[00:05:25] Brittany Fisher: Yeah, I think that particularly resonates in this industry because event planning is one of the most stressful jobs in the world. We have all heard it.

[00:05:34] Marco Ogsimer: Yes. Mm-hmm.

[00:05:34] Brittany Fisher: I feel like there's this idea that AI is going to take your job, but it's like maybe it'll just make it more manageable because there's already too much and all of these tasks are not the reason that people went into event planning. It's to do the creative side, to try and think of the next event in a different way that they're often bogged down with and don't have the time to do it.

[00:05:55] Kevin Cobb: Yeah.

[00:05:56] Marco Ogsimer: Yeah.

[00:05:56] Kevin Cobb: Absolutely.

[00:05:57] Brittany Fisher: With that and creating the next event, I kind of want to dive into personalization because that's a huge topic this year. How do you feel that expectations are shifting around personalization because of tools that customers use every single day, like Spotify that has Spotify Wrapped or the Netflix recommendations? How do you think that's shifting the industry and specifically in the events world?

[00:06:17] Marco Ogsimer: Yeah, I mean, I really think that it's fundamentally transforming the way that we're creating and personalizing events. It's enabling us to create this more emotionally resonant user journey. If attendees are more engaged, they can share feedback better and they're participating more in activities. With our experience in using Shopify and Netflix, there is also this expectation from attendees that their experience will be more intuitive to what they like. That's really what I think is driving the experience now in an event. I feel like it's not only personalizing events, but also it leads to more stronger engagement.

[00:07:01] Kevin Cobb: Yeah. I think there's no substitute for getting to know people, but back to the idea of time. How can I do all the research to know all 300 people that are going to attend in a way that allows me to create a personalized moment with them? Well, gee, it sure would be great to have an army of robots that can go find those things out for you and go tell me, scrape their LinkedIn or their social in safe ways, in ways that they make it available, or read through the survey data that they've told you if they're a return and bring back to me like the top three things this person's going to care about. Well now I can specialize or have my AI agent specialize for you, a recommendation that just as you walk in and now I can show you that I know you.

That's the next level of hospitality that is going to make in-person live, those touches that are so important now, which I'm sure we'll get into, is how much AI is actually increasing the importance of in-person events. Now we can make it even more personal, even more approachable from at a planning standpoint for me to go, "Brittany, I remember that you wanted to read this book, you posted about it last week, and it's waiting for you as a gift when you arrive in your room." That's a level of personalization, very difficult to obtain without a lot of help from a research standpoint. Those are the moments that really help events shine.

[00:08:24] Marco Ogsimer: Also, sorry, and also what I'm also seeing is that this interesting shift of this empowerment towards attendees. Before as an event planner, you decide what the experience would be, but now there's this shift of you're empowering your attendees to create their own experience and you're turning passive attendees to active participants because of that. Personalization is different from each and every one of us as an attendee. If you have that kind of personalization, you will really get stronger engagement and participation from your attendees.

[00:08:59] Kevin Cobb: That's a great point.

[00:08:59] Brittany Fisher: Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think you're basically saying is that we're cutting out that small talk where you have to have the high level conversations before you dive into, what are you really interested in, what are your passions? It's like if you can get there faster, you can create those connections, which is everything that events is all about.

[00:09:16] Marco Ogsimer: Exactly.

[00:09:17] Kevin Cobb: Yeah.

[00:09:18] Brittany Fisher: I think those are great points. When thinking about how people implement AI to make these impacts that we've talked about, how do you think that AI will change roles or skills on an event team? What skills do you think might be more important in the future than they are right now with the use of AI?

[00:09:35] Kevin Cobb: I think one of the things that AI is going to continue to teach us and encourage us, which we have as characteristics inside of all of us, but we're going to have to feed and grow, is this idea of curiosity. I think that the human part of any job has to lean into the curiosity because the better questions you ask of AI, the better responses you get. I think one of the ways that it's going to continue to adapt is to encourage us to ask better and better and better questions. With better questions, we're then going to be able to create better and better and better tools that can work on our behalf.

I think you're going to see each of us be the leader of a small army that thinks like us. Imagine what you can accomplish then in the realm of personalization, in the realm of being able to execute the next best thing or speak to the next level of personalization in your content or the way that someone can choose a path through an event. Well, with a small army of people, as scary as it is, a small army of Kevins, which should scare all of us, but a small army of people that understand the intricacies, that can be the agents that I've programmed that can do those things that allow us to reach that level that previously isn't even possible because we didn't necessarily even have the knowledge that those agents can go retrieve, combine with your knowledge, and create something that's better because they're working together.

[00:10:59] Marco Ogsimer: Yeah. Also, I think to the everlasting question of will it replace us humans? We hear it every time or all the time that it won't really, because there is still the intuitive and the empathy factor that needs to be involved in there. I feel like when you're trying to create, for example, a role out of this AI, being an AI agent, I think there's still a human factor associated to it. Yeah, I mean, I think it doesn't replace the human touch, but it's just there to amplify it. You have to see AI not just as a tool, but as a teammate. Like what any other teammate would do, it'll make your work better and faster and smarter. I think we have to think it that way.

[00:11:45] Kevin Cobb: Yeah. I think that's one of the exceptions that AI is making out of the idea of, you would have to have expertise that would be impossible for all of us to learn. I can't be a coder and a data analyst and a creative and a designer and a videographer and all of those things, but these tools, you can now find a tool that actually allows you to skip over having some of that expertise if you understand the intention, if you understand the goal, if you understand how to reach people in an empathetic and effective way with an experience. Well now you can actually do more, accomplish more than really what a human being could have done otherwise because of the hurdle of expertise, because you have to reach a certain hurdle of expertise to accomplish certain things with certain tools. Well, this actually allows you to stop that. I don't have to know Python now to do some pretty intense data analysis for survey data, and that's super cool because I don't want to learn Python.

[00:12:39] Brittany Fisher: Yeah. We're all asked to do things outside of our jobs all the time.

[00:12:43] Kevin Cobb: Yeah.

[00:12:43] Marco Ogsimer: Yes.

[00:12:44] Brittany Fisher: You're asked to code and you're like, "Okay, where do I start? How do I design this?"

[00:12:47] Marco Ogsimer: Exactly.

[00:12:48] Kevin Cobb: Yeah.

[00:12:49] Brittany Fisher: Yeah. Really what I'm getting is that curiosity and empathy are huge skills that are going to help us as humans grow with the AI technology. I'm going to put you guys on the spot a little then because I think curiosity is a great point to bring up, that we're all still learning. We aren't really AI experts and even those of us who are, are still learning and growing.

[00:13:08] Marco Ogsimer: Scratching the surface of it, yeah.

[00:13:10] Brittany Fisher: Exactly. I think the question I run into all the time is you have to set aside time to learn it and where's the best way to go about learning it to try and create that perfect prompt or to, I don't know, there's a learning curve for any new technology, and I think that intimidates a lot of people.

How would you guys recommend getting started with that so it doesn't seem so time-consuming to learn a whole new tool to see the impact of this?

[00:13:38] Marco Ogsimer: For me, I would really start small, like solving a small problem and experimenting on what kind of AI tools would solve that problem. Like what you said, there's always a learning curve, but AI could also gap that learning curve because AI is basically your teacher. You have to find the right scenario and the right problem and then test or experiment or research on what AI tools can solve that problem. I would say really, yes, I mean, you have to find time if you want to learn something. But for me, the best education is to apply it from an actual situation or an actual scenario. I know that sometimes it could be daunting for someone who is learning it and trying it for the first time, but that's why you have to test it and you have to experiment. That's really where you would find the right tools to use.

[00:14:27] Kevin Cobb: Yeah, I always encourage everyone who is starting to wander into or just wants to take the next best action in AI. You could be like, "I use ChatGPT all the time, but I don't know, it's okay, but it's not fundamentally changing how I do my job", which I think you could probably fairly say is where a lot of people are right now.

[00:14:44] Brittany Fisher: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:45] Kevin Cobb: Then the question then is, "Well, what's the next best thing that I can do so that this actually changes my life in a significant way?" I think one, be willing to read about it every day. Find a good newsletter like TLDR AI is fantastic. There's people writing on LinkedIn every single day.

[00:15:05] Brittany Fisher: Yeah.

[00:15:06] Kevin Cobb: You can just find an expert that speaks to you and consume a little bit about it every day. Then I like to think about the idea of, to Marco's point, find the problems and then go, "What would it look like if I tried to solve this in a fundamentally different way?" Then ask AI. If you don't get a response back that you want, you're like, "That didn't help me." Well then ask AI, "Well, why did you say that?" I mean, this is part of what's different about AI, and actually one of the things they don't see a lot of people do, which is they get a response, they're like, that didn't solve my problem, but then they don't follow up and say, "So why did you give me that answer?"

[00:15:38] Brittany Fisher: Right.

[00:15:38] Kevin Cobb: Or, "Help me to shape a better way, how should I phrase this to you, the ChatGPT, Claude or whatever, for you to return a better answer to me?" It will tell you, and that's part of what's great.

[00:15:49] Marco Ogsimer: What I like about AI too is that historical context also of everything that you've asked AI, so you don't really need to repeat, it will just really give you a better answer every time you're asking it.

[00:16:02] Kevin Cobb: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:02] Brittany Fisher: Yeah.

[00:16:02] Kevin Cobb: The last thing that I would say is that I've been telling more people recently is, plan a very intentional immersive time. It can be an immersive day, it can be an immersive week, if you're really aggressive, an immersive month, but you're like, "Okay, this one day a week I'm going to walk in and I'm going to put AI at the base level of everything I do. What does that mean? How does that change how I go about my normal day?" The first time you try it, it's really, really hard because you try to jump into your email and you try to, you're like, "Oh no, that doesn't put AI at the base of how I'm doing my work."

Instead, if I ask Copilot, "Summarize everything in my email from the last 24 hours, that's the most important thing for me to know, and highlight anything that is a part of my meeting today or meetings today that I haven't accomplished yet or something like that", is starting from the very beginning and making yourself do it completely differently for a certain amount of time. Then actually thinking about or reflecting, how did that change you? What can I now layer on as that next step in an immersive way to make me fundamentally change how I'm going about doing my normal work? It's a bit shocking and it will highlight to you, what do you know, what do you not know, and what do you have to learn next for this to actually be something that impacts you in a really important way?

[00:17:24] Brittany Fisher: Yeah, and it's really cool. We don't get a lot of opportunities to think like that anymore, to reshape how we're doing our jobs because there hasn't been a technology like this in a long time. I know we only have a couple of minutes left, so I'm going to just ask one final question. What is one thing that you believe that event professionals should start doing right now when it comes to AI?

[00:17:49] Marco Ogsimer: What they should be prepping right now is like what I mentioned earlier, AI is just not a tool. They have to consider it as their teammate. I read this somewhere to where it's also interesting to me because the shift that we're seeing is not just technological, but it's actually cultural. It's going to be a cultural shift because of the way that we work, the way that we tackle problems, it's going to be different. I feel everyone or anyone or a team who embraces or who would embrace this new era of using AI, would really lead the new era also of experiential events.

[00:18:29] Kevin Cobb: Yeah.

[00:18:29] Brittany Fisher: That's a great point.

[00:18:30] Kevin Cobb: What's interesting, and maybe a bit of a paradox is that I would start it with a very analog thing, and I would ask anybody in events to sit down and to write on a piece of paper, what are three things that if you no longer had to do it or spend a significant amount of time on it, that would create the most time and space for you? Then when you finish that, go and ask at least three AIs how they would solve these three things using AI so that you wouldn't have to do it anymore and see what it comes back at, and then try them. Try those things and then make it a little bit better.

The whole point is attack the thing that will do the most good for you as your next step. Starting very, very analog, very intentional, and do it that way. Then try those tools. It's very hard. All of us, we're all human beings. We will default to the way we've always done, and we will do that over and over and over again. We are in this accelerated time right now where none of us as humans or professionals can afford to do that anymore. We have to try, got to try these tools.

[00:19:33] Brittany Fisher: I totally agree. I think what's really interesting is what I'm getting out of this whole conversation is that AI is not just your teammate, but it's your teacher. I feel like that's not talked about enough of how AI can teach us, how we can use it to build those skills and teach us along the way and how this is really going to be a cultural shift throughout the entire world.

[00:19:55] Marco Ogsimer: Yep.

[00:19:56] Kevin Cobb: Yeah.

[00:19:56] Brittany Fisher: I think that really answers the question of is it going to make an impact and with a resounding yes. Thank you guys for coming and speaking. This was great.

[00:20:06] Marco Ogsimer: Thanks for having us.

[00:20:07] Brittany Fisher: Yeah.

[00:20:07] Kevin Cobb: Yes, thanks for having us. It was a lot of fun.

[00:20:08] Brittany Fisher: I look forward to hearing more from you guys soon.

[00:20:11] Kevin Cobb: Fantastic.

[00:20:11] Marco Ogsimer: Yes. Thank you.

[00:20:12] Brittany Fisher: Yeah, thank you.

[00:20:15] Alyssa Peltier: Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

[00:20:26] Rachel Andrews: You can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you, discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

[00:20:35] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:20:42] Rachel Andrews: Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

[00:20:52] Felicia Asiedu: Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

[00:21:02] Alyssa Peltier: That's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.